Damage from Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast, Oct. 30, 2012. Photo: US Air Force/Wikimedia Commons
“Thank God for Sandy!” said Leviticus Sumpter, a supervisor of a mold clean-up team in New York City, to The Brooklyn Bureau.
“I’m not going to say that,” said Albert Gibbs, Sumpter’s nephew and also part of the crew. “I’m going to say, ‘Thank God for employment.’ […] One person’s mishap is another person’s blessing.”
The tragedy of thousands of lives overturned in the wake of Hurricane—later superstorm—Sandy has become a success story for the Occupy movement, bringing the group national recognition for its efforts to help their fellow man recover from a disaster with a far-reaching level of destruction (somewhat less than the infamous Hurricane Katrina).
Successive US administrations have regarded unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as among the most effective tools for fighting the ‘war on terror’. John Brennan – Barak Obama’s pick for the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – has stated that UAVs are surgically precise weapons that allow the United States to undertake the ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists. Collateral damage, in terms of the lives of civilians and pilots, is minimized, with UAVs also thought to be cheaper to purchase per unit than fighter aircraft. If so, then UAVs may eventually replace aircraft as the mainstay of the United States’ Air Force.
UAVs have, therefore, become an essential feature of the United States’ vision of lighter and more technologically advanced armed forces capable of conducting light-footprint warfare. This places far less emphasis on fighting land wars and more on the use of UAVs, special-forces, private contractors and local partners to target a diffused and dispersed network of enemies. As part of its commitment to light-footprint warfare, Washington has been working to establish a network of small airbases in Africa to track extremist groups like al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Al Shabaab, and hunt down alleged war criminals like Jospeh Kony.
Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 215th Corps on patrol in Sangin, Helmand. Photo: Al Jazeera English/flickr.
The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 2014 has been the central foreign policy issue of both of Obama’s Presidential campaigns. American citizens seem to generally support the initiative, while both criticizing the timing and questioning the outcome for the U.S. and Afghanistan. Many ordinary Americans have asked why the U.S. should keep engaging with Afghanistan post-2014, or why the withdrawal cannot come sooner so as to avoid the unnecessary losses of American soldiers. Others argue that the United States, as a world leader, should act responsibly to prevent Afghanistan from falling into a devastating civil war, and thus criticize the withdrawal as a product of poor judgment that will lead inevitably to chaos. As an example, they cite the post-Soviet withdrawal, following which the U.S. abandoned the country and it fell under Taliban control.
Serving as political affairs officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) last year, I observed – like many others inside and outside the country – that for various reasons the local population did not feel very hospitable towards the international forces, to say the least. Many Afghans, either ignorantly or deliberately, do not see any difference between the ISAF and the international community, referring to all of them as Americans or American puppets. For that very reason, the incident that occurred on 1 April 2011, when the UN compound in one of the regions was attacked by demonstrators infuriated over the burning of the Qur’an. More recently there has been a steady increase in so-called green-on-blue attacks on ISAF soldiers. Instead of going into the details of each incident, we can ask more generally: Do Afghans want Americans in their country beyond 2014?
Kurdistan Workers’ Party soldiers. Photo: james_gordon_losangeles/flickr.
Who carried out the execution of three women prominent in the European branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Paris on January 9 and what was their intended message are unclear. The dead included Sakine Cansız, a long-time senior figure in the organization, Fidan Doğan, the Paris representative of the pro-PKK Kurdistan National Congress, and Leyla Söylemez, a younger Kurdish activist. Regional players and pundits are already speculating: the assassinations were carried out by Turkey’s “Deep State;” they are opening shots in a war within the PKK over leadership and policy; or it might be Syria, Iran, or some other regional actor with an axe to grind. The motives ascribed depend on who was the actor and how conspiratorially inclined the pundit is. The obvious context is the unprecedented opening toward one another carried out in recent weeks by the Turkish government and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. For one reason or another, the perpetrators wanted to derail or at least skew that discussion, and they may well succeed.
Öcalan and the authorities in Ankara have danced with one another for some time. As early as 2005, Turkish intelligence engaged in quiet conversations with him and other PKK leaders, especially in Europe, to see whether and how some modus vivendi could end the violence. These sometimes showed promise, and some positive steps were taken, but ultimately each effort ran aground. In December, the authorities allowed Öcalan’s brother Mehmet to travel to his prison on Imralı Island in the Sea of Marmara, where the PKK leader has been held since 1999. Mehmet Öcalan subsequently announced that his brother believes “a new Kurdish initiative [by Turkey] could take place” to which, “if deep powers do not intervene,” the imprisoned PKK leader “will contribute.” Öcalan subsequently defused an anti-government hunger strike being staged by imprisoned Kurds accused of terrorism. On December 28, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made public that Turkish intelligence had met with Öcalan directly days earlier–the first such public admission of high-level government conversations with the jailed PKK leader. In another unprecedented move, the government subsequently allowed two parliamentarians representing the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) to meet with Öcalan on Imralı and were reportedly told by the PKK leader that the era of armed struggle is over. These and other BDP figures traveled immediately after to northern Iraq and Europe to brief the PKK leadership abroad on Öcalan’s status and plans.
A camp set up by the DRC national army to protect Goma from the M23 rebel group. Photo: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti
The ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been one of the deadliest since World War II, with over 5 million casualties. Though the latest in a series of civil wars ended in 2003 and the transition to peace and democracy began in 2006, the mineral-rich eastern DRC continues to experience widespread violence. Behind the official front lines, fighting continues, with an ever-growing number of actors destabilizing an already fragile region. In recent months, it was the so-called M23 rebel movement that once again drew international attention to the DRC with its capture of Goma, a regional capital on the border with Rwanda.
Also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army, M23 named itself after the 23 March 2009 peace accord signed between the government of the DRC and the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a rebel militia composed mostly of ethnic Tutsis. After the collapse of the peace deal, former CNDP leader Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, who in 2006 was indicted by the ICC for recruiting child soldiers, led the formation of this new rebel group, which is some 1,200 to 6,000 fighters-strong. Citing unfair treatment and an incomplete fulfillment of the peace deal, which saw the integration of the group into the Congolese army, M23 led a mutiny in April 2012. Heavy fighting ensued, which eventually led to the capture of Goma at the end of November – despite the presence of MONUSCO peacekeepers and Congolese troops. Eleven days after seizing the city, however, as part of a regionally brokered deal, M23 withdrew from Goma and agreed to observe a 20 km buffer zone around the city in exchange for a range of their demands being met, including the release of political prisoners.
