AFGHANISTAN, AGAIN

The Italian bi-monthly LIMES, edited by Lucio Carracciolo, is perhaps the one absolutely indispensable geopolitical magazine in existence: well-informed, independent, clearly written by a world-wide array of expert scholars, and accompanied by excellent maps, it has -- despite its substantial sale -- only one serious defect: it is written in Italian, meaning that it is not as widely read as it deserves to be, in western intelligence circles.

Its current issue, on Afghanistan, raises some very interesting questions. I am quite sure that our 'authorities' know all about such questions; the problem is that we the citizens and voters, probably do not. Here, as a public service, I offer just one of many snippets in the issue: on the parlous question of Osama bin Laden.

To be completely transparent, let me state that I have been among the 'correspondents' of LIMES for at least the past twenty years.

The extract below is from an article by Margherita Paolini about Pakaf ( Pakistan/Afghanistan), in the author's words, the 'key' to the whole Afghan problem.

"The declared objective of the United States is, as a pre-condition for their political re-integration, to obtain from the Taliban a definitive guarantee that they have broken off their relations with Al-Qaeda. If this refers to the Zawahiri-bin Laden group of the second half of the 1990s, progressively reprived of its leadership from 2002 on and deprived of its political audience by decision of the ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] after 2004, there would be no problem. That Al-Qaeda belongs to a remote past. Just this last September [2009] Mullah Omar declared that the Taliban was willing to do so, and that the only remaining issue in its negotiations with the United States was the date by which foreign troops would leave the country, as in Iraq (the preferred model for Pakistan).

"If on the other hand the United States refers to the terrorist activities of other groups operating under the Al-Qaeda banner -- such as Paklistani groups -- and these other groups may not even be named, then the problem remains. The danger of such groups and their infiltration into the Pakistani government was clearly shown in the David Coleman Headley, alias Daud Gilani, affair. The son of a diplomat and at home in the right circles in the United States, Gilani was able to plan in detail the acknowledged attacks in Mumbai.

"In this context, the American challenge to terrorism, with its current intelligence strategy amd without an unconditional structural collaboration with the Pakistani government and the ISI, risk becoming as dangerous a pantomime as it was under Bush.

"The question as to whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive is another oddity. It's not so much a matter of the videos and tape-recordings themselves, most of them quite obviously fake, but of their content, which in no way corresponds to Osama's known ideology: especially in regard to keeping the umma unified against its enemies, the United States, Israel and those nations in the Islamic world who betray Islamic principles. It was always a bin Laden priority not to exacerbate or broaden the religious divide between Sunni and Shia Islam. The exact opposite is what happen in Iraq with Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, whose true patrons are to be found among Sunni intengralist ideologues who consider Shiites heretics, a stance which coincided perfectly with Pakistani jihadism.

"Bin Laden was most probably liquidated in December-January 2001-2002 when Osama was residing in the secret hospital of the Binori madrasi in Karachi. The appropriate person, whom bin Laden trusted, was to hand: Omar Said Sheikh, who co-ordinated relations between Osama and the ISI (and who also turns up in the Bhutto assassination). This Omar was cited by the FBI as the man responsible for the killing of the American journalist Pearl; he was tried in Pakistan and condemned to death to take him out of American hands. The death-sentence was never carried out. In fact, Omar Said, safe in a military prison in Rawalpindi, was able to follow the Mumbai attacks and sought to precipitate a crisis between India and Pakistan with counterfeit telephone calls (using British sim cards) to isolate both the Pakistani president, Zardari and the Indian Foreign Minister Mukherjee. His objective, quickly frustrated, was to transfer Pakistani troops from the tribal areas to the Indian frontier.

"Sooner or later, Omar said will be freed if the lead terrorist in the trial of the Al-Qaeda Seven, the Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, admits to being himself responsible for the murder of Pearl."

FLASH STUFF

When I first got wind of something called 'flash fiction', I had to ask about to find out what it was. The Republic is a backward sort of place when it comes to what is fashionable in New York.

In case my readers are no more trendy than I, let me explain: flash fiction is a new fad designed for the dumb who write with their thumbs. Short, very short, even exiguous 'stories' a few lines long. They've sprouted like weeds, get distributed on the Net and sent to all and sundry like so much literary spam. I have been sent several score in the last week alone.

This would not matter had it not been brought to my attention that our Contributing Editor, James Wood, had written in praise of someone called Lydia Davis. I could not check this out, for I do not subscribe the The New Yorker. I used to, but my copies never arrived. Supposing the report to be true, and knowing James, I have to believe the woman has something going for her. And if she doesn't, it is also true that any critic can have his idiosyncrasies, and if you're as good a reader and as thoughtful a critic as Mr. Wood, so be it. After all, there are people who think Alberto Manguel is Hot Stuff.

Now it turns out that Harper's -- once a solid, even stollid magazine -- has published some FF. I read but one, so banal and inane I had to read its 40 words or so several times to see if it did not contain a coded message of great import. No, it didn't. It was what it appeared to be: boy, girl, two kids and the perfect life.

I think this form has great potentiality for porn. You read it here first. Flash Porn. I offer the first (though not to Harper's):

He didn't know where to put it. He tried a flower poet; it broke. The mare bolted. Then came Amanda.

I particularly like the double entendre in Amanda coming.

As any fifty pieces of this rubbish could be written in an hour and sent --for instance to the once rigorous Farrar, Strauss & Giroux -- let the Creative Imagination flow freely! There's nothing difficult about writing. Or flashing. Whether you open the mental, or the trouser zip.

Oh no! Not you, James!

REALITY CHECKS IN ARIZONA

I don't often agree with TRoL Contributor Anis Shivani (See 'Huntsville') -- he belongs to a committed Left most sensible people have long seen as irrelevant, if not positively dangerous. But in the present ,nstance Shivani is dead right, and the fact that his posting is from Huffington should deter no one from reading him.

There is also one other thing we share. We are among the many people who are disillusioned, disappointed and disenchanted by the president for whom we all had some affection and many hopes. It's doubtful that we can reach the man in his present eminence. Nonetheless, the message must be impressed on him: that not A SINGLE ONE of his campaign promises -- from Guantanamo through health reform or Afghanistan -- HAS BEEN KEPT. Not one.

Maybe some of this is due to Republican obstructionism, maybe some of it due to the inherent inefficiency of our legislative branch, but the blame must fall squarely on Obama himself: a man of charm and intelligence, but just another standard politician making hay while the sun still shines.

When it comes to Arizona's new immigration policy, I urge you to read Shivani's post below.

IMMIGRATION A L'ARIZONA

THE HUFFINGTON POST

'Obama and the Arizona Immigration Law'

Anis Shivani

Posted: April 24, 2010 01:57 PM

The key provision to worry about in this repressive legislation is the idea that anyone illegally present in the state of Arizona broke the law. Law enforcement is authorized to go after people who are suspected of committing this misdemeanor.

Yet in the Schumer/Graham immigration plan being touted by Obama, the central idea is to make undocumented immigrants accept that they "broke the law." What does this mean? Admit that they committed a misdemeanor? Or a felony? Forever after be branded as criminals, and lose certain rights or privileges attached to citizenship?

Obama never said a word in support of the humane Gutierrez legislation introduced in the House in December 2009. As expected, he got behind the far more punitive Schumer/Graham plan.

Arizona has only taken the (im)moral lead from the White House and taken it to its logical, extreme conclusion.

At no point in the last year and a half have Obama and his people tried to change the tone on immigration. Raids continue. Deportations are at record levels, despite the presumably far smaller flow of immigrants due to the depressed economy. The idea of criminality has become completely intertwined with immigration. The administration makes no attempt to sever the connection; instead, it emphasizes it at every turn.

Schumer/Graham want a biometric identity card for all Americans. Arizona is just trying to do it in a clumsy, manual, heavy-handed way. The idea is the same. Brown people are to be suspected from the get-go until they can clear their name.

The Arizona law is the natural outcome of caving in to xenophobia and exaggerated fears of terrorism at the federal level. Sure, Arizona is crazy, reprehensible, self-destructive. They'll bring ruin on their own economy, for one thing. But the feds are no less insane and "misguided," to use Obama's own language.

This is the price to pay for a year and a half of indifference to constitutional procedures. In an environment where the federal government continues to operate secret prisons, refuses to end the Guantanamo principle, and doesn't unequivocally separate itself from torture, why should the Arizona law be any surprise?

It's been Obama, far more than Bush, who has successfully implemented the idea at the practical level that local law enforcement is the appropriate agency to enforce immigration laws. Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor, is firmly behind the idea. Yet they act surprised when Arizona formalizes the principle.

Instead of prospectively warning Arizona of having to face the full brunt of the law, Obama calmly announces that his administration will look into possible illegality. Sure, let things take their course, and meanwhile use the opportunity to tout your own criminalizing piece of legislation.

What "reform" can we expect at the federal level? It won't just be Arizona immigrants having to admit they broke the law. It will be all undocumented immigrants. It's okay if Obama presents it as "reform."

LITERARY SQUABBLES

Friends send me links to the small wars insistently being waged on the many battlefields of literature. One such received yesterday revealed -- shock! horror! -- that the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), one Ted Genoways (an old Immigration mis-hearing of Genovese?) had published his own work, that there are subsidies involved, and that he is grossly overpaid (any editor who is paid at all is overpaid is my opinion) because he is a buddy of higher-ups at the University of Virginia. The link was to a pleasant site belonging to the West Coast magazine Zyzzyva, http://Zyzzivaspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/09/ted-genoways-inserts-himself.html.

I can't say I'm a regular reader of the VQR, nor of its editor's poetry. To the specifics of the case I am therefore blind -- though aroused to hear that this editorial machinery is supported in the five-zero range by that illustrious university. Mr. G. may be a good poet or he may be a bad one; the principle is the same. Editors can do as they damned please. But is this editor the fons et origo of his journal? or has he a master, the university? If the latter, he can only do as he damned pleases if he doesn't offend his master.

Now, largely speaking, universities and university presses are gentle if reluctant masters. All sorts of universities have both magazines and presses, and if they were not intellectual softies, it's hard to beieve that their publications departments -- always expensive and hugely overstaffed -- would survive. Where in this hard world of ours would a real press exist, were it not in the cozy confines of the Academy? I consider it one of the great achievements of John Silber at Boston University to have stonewalled any attempt to create such a press, though he did pass over a couple of journals such as Agni. It is likely that having once been defrauded by the late William Phillips into acquiring what was left of the Partisan Review, he didn't wish to be bitten a second time. And Agni never had more than a modest subsidy -- nothing like the VQR.

What I find especially picturesque about VQR lies in the notion that literary magazines require editorial "staff time', peer reviews, or what the Kenyon Review 's editor sententiously calls an "Editorial Tree". How many editors does it take to 'edit' a poet?

I just don't see how anyone would be startled by the ambiguities of Mr. Genoway's publishing himself. All good editors who are also writers write in their magazines. It is an essential part of their functions. Readers and subscribers are entitled to know how qualified the editor is to pass judgment on what they are given to read. If he should happen to express a fancy for one of the current voltigeurs -- say a Paul Auster -- tant pis, too bad. The high wire is a tricky place for literary toddlers. It isn't as though literary log-rolling were anything new: the Scratch Principle works up and down the literary ladder. That's how writers plan their rise, while other writers plan their rivals' fall.

PRESS

A Mr. Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Washington Post, feels seriously aggrieved that the press was excluded from the meetings of the forty-odd heads of state meeting in Washington to discuss nuclear proliferation. Good grief! The boys and girls who so entertain us with questions when they are admitted, had to do without their sandwiches and peanuts?

I have attended press conferences and such events for decades: so puerile and provincial were the questions asked -- not to speak of the answers given -- that I made myself a rule: where the press goes (whether in their scores or their hundreds) there go not I. To admit the press to such occasions is to exclude diplomacy, which is a personal matter. I never felt I had any entitlement to information; I had to overhear gossip, to question friends, to move about in the shadows, to talk to assistants and assistants to assistants to get what I wanted. And what I wanted was not some handout, but a feel for the event and the people involved.

This whine from Mr. Milbank, on behalf of media to whom no one pays serious attention, is particularly absurd when the subject discussed is clearly one in which (a) high risk is involved. and (b) the President could be expected to discuss, openly, such intelligence information as he had. Kowtowing to our dim press and even dimmer television is one of our fatal mistakes. Good reporters are discreet and have long-standing relationships with people who move about in government circles. When both sides -- press and the state -- have built up relations of mutual respect, then reporting and governing both become better. All that a reporter needs to know is much more likely to come over a good dinner with a trusted source than from any number of press conferences.

The sad truth is that our reporters have largely become adversaries, and not very good ones at that. That is not how you get invited to the high table. For that, you have to be interesting in and of yourself, have decent manners, and know your place.

POLAND

The few people who read The Republic Letters -- which in the current issue published Josez Czapski's account of Katyn -- will be able to view some (but not all) of the terrible ironies involved in the crash, at Smolensk, of a plane carrying Poland's president and much of its political leadership. My Google News, ever quick to be utterly superficial, headed its lead story with the headline that we needn't worry: the stock market would quickly recover. Well, that's nice to know.

Regardless of the lives and histories of the 97 people who died in the crash -- the political leadership in Poland is not that different from our own, consisting in equal portions of self-importance and a Faustian bargain with that elusive commodity, power -- that the crash should have taken place where and when it did is catastrophic. It re-awakens old wounds: the destruction of Poland's elites by the Soviet Union (precisely what the fatal flight was to commemorate); the criminal annihilation of Poland in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin; the miserable self-destruction of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, so ill-planned that it was doomed to failure; the utter failure of Poland's allies to meet their treaty obligations; the Soviet army encamped on the right bank of the Vistula watching Warsaw being razed to the ground; and the horrors of being so long -- from 1945 to 1989 -- relegated to a satrapy of Russia. Worst of all, the Polish tendency to hallow, internally, in its very soul, the worm of Doubt: are they the only people in Europe to be continually mocked by fate and by some inner failure?

As I wrote in a letter of condolence to my many Polish friends -- since Saul Bellow's death I have far more friends and equals in Poland than in the debased culture of the United States -- 'In Poland one does not "make" politics; one dies of it.

This is what Marek Bienczyk wrote back from Warsaw:

'The symbols flutter about us like recycled rags; it's hard not to think of them. On the other hand, I am enraged: not just a catastrophe, as you say, but yet another piece of Polish fatuity: the plane should never have tried to land in those conditions. But time pressed, the ceremony was to start in a half-hour, the pilot (perhaps urged on by the president) made his decision.

"The nation reacted y doing what it does best: candles lit, hymns, endless masses of people, priests on TV, debates: unde malum? Who's to blame? Forms of extreme masochism, the same old romantic resentment: what is bad shall be turned to good; we must be angelized, become living angels. It drives me crazy. Five minutes of thought, postpone the ceremony for three hours and not land. It was another Warsaw Uprising: doomed to failure,

"Yes, of course, I went out in the evening and lit my own candle."

NATIONAL ANTHEMS

So I watched an unremarkable Opening Day game at Fenway.

By now I am innured to what happens to that most akward anthem every written, the Star Spangled Banner. Babes wreck it in halter tops (what would you expect from Miami?), rock-stars distort it for a few hundred thousand, and sometimes you still get it straight: from Marine bands, little kids, fresh-faced sopranos and the like. Most of this is pretty disgusting, but then our anthem is no great shakes anyway. If it brings tears to your eyes, it must be nostalgia. I mean, compared with the bersaglieri quick-stepping through the operatic Italian anthem, the Marseillaise (which has a residual meaning -- Get your guns out, Citizens!), the delicious harmonies of the Dutch or God Save the Queen, the words and music of our anthem are pretty stinky.

So awful in fact are they that they too have become part of the entertainment industry. They tell the poor guy or girl, go out there and do what you can with it. Well, last night, in the seventh inning, we got an old crock from Aerosmith, fresh from rehab and with a well-scrubbed daughter by his side, doing what he could with its rival, God Bless America, a treacle tart for which I have no appetite whatever. I can fairly report two things about Mr. Tyler's performance: drugs or no, he can neither sing nor speak English. Yekh! Those sprawling nasal vowels, those indeterminate high notes, those worn and abused vocal cords!

In the eighth inning we were treated to one Neil Diamond and his Slick Chestnut, Sweet Caroline. The man wouldn't excel accompanying a palm court orchestra at the Plaza or, for that matter, leaning on a piano somewhere South of Liberace. But he was utterly harmless and amiable: a little like the Sox and their owner.

The crowd seemed entranced; but then who ever said that Sox fans were a discriminating lot?

We are an odd lot, those of us who can remember that a certain solemnity came with our national anthems. Solemnity and respect. However wretched the blasted anthems are -- try the Argentine on for size, which goes on and on! -- I ask you to consider what would happen were any of our bimbos, or Mr. Tyler, to 'sing' the Marseillaise on Bastille Day! Come on, Citizens, reach for your guns!

PRIESTS AND PAEDOPHILIA

I have no intention to open a debate on the Church and sexual abuse.

I would merely like to ask how many New York Times or Guardian readers or reporters have been employed in the care of deaf, destitute or orphaned children: as volunteers, in the name of charity?

When Italy became a state in 1870, one of the first acts of the new national regime was to abolish all church institutions -- whether astronomical observatories, orphanages or homes for Incurables. The result was a huge burden on the state and its tax-payers. What is astonishing is not that some priests failed in their duty of care, but that all religious institutions should be stigmatized for the errors of the few: as though such abuse did not exist in state instututions.

Selfless charity is a gift: that some abuse it is horrid and reprehensible. But it happens. Shall we have, perhaps, a bringing to account of those who operated the Gulag? Would we rather personally man institutes for deaf children? How many bed-pans have the pampered press emptied recently?

I particularly enjoy, however, the 'official' Jewish response to the sermon by Pope's preacher which compared the atacks on the Church to the Holocaust. There seems to be a gold standard for suffering out there: screw Rwandans, abused children in Eire, the citizens of Zimbabwe: only the Jewish extermination counts. It's incommensurable.

I beg to differ. All human suffering is and should be shared by all. It is all wrong. There are no world records in suffering or death.

DRUG QUEENS, OLLIE NORTH & AFGHANISTAN

It was not at all reassuring to drop in on CNN last night and find that ageing figure of other splendid American external policies, Ollie North, interviewing the lady boss of the DEA -- The Drug Enforcement Agency -- in some picturesque landscape in a rural area of Helmand province in Afghanistan (from which my son returned after six months of harrowing duty.) It had been freshly 'reconquered' (and of course would soon enough return to its earlier status.)

The lady in question wore some sort of bulge about her middle, presumably bullet-proof, and, prompted by Ollie, managed to smile wanly as she said that her visit was made in the hope of 'interdicting' the opium crop in that part of the world.

Why?

For several thousand years opium, or its derivative, morphine (laudanum) has been the analgesic of choice. Like most other 'natural' drugs -- coca leaves, quinine, etc. -- opium will not harm you. Their chemical derivatives -- heroin, cocaine, atropine -- can and will kill you if you use them to excess. Nor is addiction to opium per se in any way harmful. It is a peaceful drug, and in my parents' house in London there was no social approbrium of any kind attached to its consumption: as Sherlock Holmes well knew, or Harold Acton, that remarkable historian, who died peacefully in his nineties after life-long use.

One would think that the United States, which invented Prohibition and its accompanying gang wars, would have learned something since the early 'Twenties. But not so. Nor has President Calderon in Mexico yet learned the lesson. Ban something, anything, and its price will go up; and if it is made scarce, the wrong sort of people will make more money. What has happened in Ciudad Juarez just across the border, is a direct result of the DEA's 'war on drugs'.

The end-buyer (oh, what a surprise!) is largely an American. A report in BOMB, that chi-chi mag in the Big Apple, details the platinum-haired art-dealers and others of the trendy set, passing the powder about with the hors d'oeuvres. It is sold right on school property. To the User, no harm comes -- one day his nose will rot, but he wasn't worth much to start with.

Before the DEA it was otherwise. Opium at least was available at a reasonable price in your local pharmacy, which kept a register, and sold no more to any addict than the quantity his addiction called for. We knew who smoked it, because we saw him at dinner parties: not zonked out, but fresh from writing, say, Kubla Khan.

The US Embassy in Bogota is the second largest in the world. We have so much diplomacy in Colombia? No. Because the DEA is there, living the life of Reilly. Meanwhile, the speedboats from Colombia drop off their commercial cocaine a few hundred meters from my beach. Our local drug sub-king, Edwin, owns the town I live in. His twelve-year-old son drives a car on the highway and on the beach in front of my house. Both are illegal of course, but no one will say boo to Edwin. He's just a local business-man. But he and the rest of them make their money straight from the DEA.

In Persia, opium was (and is) a source of poetry and pleasure; in New York, the only poetry lies in the money made by the dealers and the only pleasure lies in the swank of those platinum-haired twits as they snort. What was not a problem in my youth is now a Problem writ large. Who created it? the Prohibitionists.