حزب مردم بلوچستان  Balochistan People’s Party  بلوچستانءِ اُستمانءِ گــَل

"Why Should I Vote in a Pakistani Election?"

On the Campaign Trail in Pakistan
Jan. 11, 2008

By Nicholas Schmidle ; http://www.slate.com/

Pakistanis were scheduled to go to the polls Jan. 8 to choose a new parliament, but the election schedule was adjusted following the Dec. 27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. In December and January, Nicholas Schmidle spent several weeks traveling throughout the country to report on the campaign. Though the elections have been postponed until Feb. 18, his dispatches paint a colorful and much-needed portrait of a country increasingly well-covered in the mainstream press, but too often simplified by stereotypes.

QUETTA, Pakistan—Naiz Mohammad, an illiterate man who doesn't know his age but guesses he's around 50, squatted on a rocky hillside just outside Quetta and told me how he teaches his children. More than a dozen kids, caked head to toe in dust, crowded around, their bellies swollen with worms, greenish snot yo-yoing from their noses. A range of treeless mountains rose behind us, and Quetta's parched cityscape spread in front. Hundreds of rectangular mud huts, all of them inhabited by Naiz's fellow tribesmen, stood scattered along the pitched slope. Spindly desert twigs snagged shreds of plastic shopping bags, which flapped in the biting wind. New Kahan, Naiz's village, has neither phone service nor electricity or running water. There is a government school nearby, but few kids actually attend. "We have a natural cycle of educating our people," said Naiz, who wore a black turban and camouflage jacket. "For instance, you people came today in a big jeep. When you leave, my boys will ask me, 'Why we don't have a jeep like that?' I'll tell them, and then they'll understand the deprivation that the Baluchis suffer."

Quetta is the capital of Baluchistan, the largest—and poorest—of Pakistan's four provinces. The majority of Baluchistan's 10 million inhabitants are Baluchis, though Pashtun tribes form a significant minority in the northern part of the province, and there are Punjabi- and Urdu-speaking "settlers" living in Quetta. Since Pakistan's creation in 1947, a percolating Baluchi nationalist movement has resulted in five insurgencies against the Pakistani army, most intensely 1973-77 and from 2005 to today. The nationalists argue that Pakistan illegally occupied the independent Baluchi state in 1948 and has been treating the Baluchis like colonial subjects ever since. When prospectors discovered natural gas in the remote mountains near Naiz's ancestral village in 1953, it only added to the Baluchis' sense of perceived injustice; they were the last in the country to enjoy gas stovetops and furnaces.

Naiz's tribe, the Marri, is the most militant and nationalist of the Baluchi tribes. During the 1970s rebellion against the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (Benazir's father), Naiz enlisted alongside guerrillas in an insurgency that left nearly 10,000 rebels and soldiers dead. "Then and now, we are only fighting for our rights, for an independent Baluchistan, where we are masters of our own land," he said. According to Naiz, the Pakistani government has punished the Baluchis by refusing to develop the province. But running water and electricity are not his top priorities. "We just want the government to stop bombing us."

Naiz is originally from Kahan, a town in the gas-rich district of Kohlu. In the late 1980s, after a stint living in Afghanistan, Naiz and thousands of fellow tribesmen moved to Quetta and established New Kahan, partly to escape the constant fighting and bombardment in their native lands and partly because they wanted to be near their tribal chief. The tribal system revolves around obedience to the chief, or sardar. President Pervez Musharraf blames a few sardars, including the one from the Marri tribe, for the violence and instability engulfing Baluchistan. Since 2005, a guerrilla outfit known as the Baluchistan Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks on army convoys, oil installations, and railroads. The Marris comprise the top leadership of the BLA, which Musharraf declared a banned terrorist organization in April 2006. Yet the BLA aren't alone; politicians, writers, and university students use their own methods to argue for an independent Baluchistan. And while they stress the nonviolent nature of their own tactics, their sympathies are unmistakable. "I pray for the BLA that God will help them remove the Punjabi forces from Baluchistan," said Mohiuddin Baluch, the chairman of the Baluchistan Students Organization.

I arrived in Quetta in early December, just as the election campaign was beginning, to find army and paramilitary forces deployed in the streets. An armored personnel carrier sat just outside the entrance to my hotel, machine-gun barrels poked out of sandbag bunkers at major intersections, and heavily armed convoys patrolled the roads every evening after sundown. Two weeks earlier, a top BLA commander (and son of the chief of the Marri tribe) was killed, setting off a wave of riots and guerrilla attacks on security forces that left dozens dead. I asked Naiz if he considered the dead BLA commander a fallen hero. "We don't live in circumstances where we have time to dream of heroes," he answered. "Independent Baluchistan is our hero. And sometimes we are obliged to carry out attacks on Pakistani forces to achieve this."

On my first night in Quetta, a soldier, standing behind a stack of sandbags near the center of town, took a bullet in the face and died. The intelligence agencies, police, and paramilitaries responded with house-to-house raids in BLA strongholds from Kohlu to Quetta. They cordoned off New Kahan and arrested 12 of Naiz's fellow tribesmen. In many cases over the last two years, young Baluchi men have simply "disappeared," kidnapped by Pakistan's intelligence agencies. Others have been arrested and charged with treason. (In the autumn of 2006, I spent several weeks reporting in Baluchistan; by the time my story was published a few months later, nearly every featured character had been arrested or exiled.) A politician in Quetta told me that 6,000 Baluchi men were missing. Another man described how his cousin had been kidnapped by Anti-Terror Force troops in front of his four nephews in a city park. I asked how the four kids, aged between 4 and 8, knew the identity of the kidnappers. "In America, your children play with toys. That's what they know," he explained. "Our children know about the intelligence agencies and the army. This is what they grow up on."

Nonetheless, not all the Baluchi tribes are fighting against the government. In fact, Musharraf's own party, the Pakistan Muslim League, is stacked with compliant sardars and tribal chieftains. "Though many of these tribes, since the inception of Pakistan, have been bearing anti-state feelings, some of them got on the bandwagon, and they've been ruling this province ever since," said Anwar ul-Haq, a first-time candidate for the parliamentary seat from Quetta, running on the PML (Q) ticket. "For these people, being part of the establishment presents a huge opportunity for personal aggrandizement." Later that day, I attended a PML (Q) rally with Haq in the same part of town where Western intelligence sources have alleged that Mullah Omar and other top Taliban leaders enjoy safe haven; in other words, a neighborhood where Musharraf and his cohorts are none too popular. Bodyguards assigned to protect the PML (Q) candidates stood on nearby rooftops, surrounded the stage, and mingled in the crowd. At one point, a rock hurled over the wall landed in the crowd of spectators. With a half-nervous smirk, my friend said, "At least it wasn't a grenade."

When it was his turn to speak, Haq leaned on the podium with both hands and promoted a candidate for the provincial assembly because he wasn't a sardar and therefore "understands your problems." He added, "We will provide education, not Kalashnikovs, for your children. Now is the time for your decision. Give us your vote, and we will deliver." I asked Haq, a middle-class divorcee in his late 30s with no tribal roots and no obvious constituency, if he planned to campaign in New Kahan. Earlier that day, Naiz told me that no candidate had visited New Kahan in years, although there were roughly 4,000 voters there. "Ideally, no party should ignore any area," Haq answered. "But would the people in the Marri areas even allow me to go there? I doubt it. They only respond to certain social norms, those filtered through the tribe."

Back in New Kahan, I crouched beside Naiz, our jeep, and a horde of children, and shielded my eyes as a dust cloud blew across the exposed hillside. Naiz admitted that any decision about whether or not to vote, and for whom, would be decided by the tribal chiefs. Naiz hadn't participated in an election since 1995. I asked him which way he was leaning this time around. "Why should I vote in a Pakistani election?" he said. "I don't even recognize Pakistan."
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Ethnic tensions divide Iran

19-01-2007 ; http://www.thespectrum.com

Iranian gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz have been in the news, but here's a story you haven't heard. It occurred in the Caspian Sea on Jan. 4 after an Iranian patrol boat opened fire on an allegedly illegal fishing expedition. A 20-year-old fisherman, Hissmauddin Khadivar, was killed and around 30 of his comrades arrested, all from the port of Bandar in Golestan province.

Golestan lies along Iran's northern border, alongside the neighboring country of Turkmenistan. Its popu-lation is predominantly Turkmen, a separate ethnic group within Iran. Turkmen usually have a decidedly Asiatic appearance and are mostly Sunni Muslims. About 2 million line in Iran and there have been at least two serious Turkmen uprisings against Tehran's rule, in the 1920s and in the 1980s. Both were quickly quashed.


Young Khadivar's death sparked a mini-revolt in Golestan, according to Amir Taheri, an Iranian exile who writes about his homeland. Angry Turkmen set vehicles on fire and attacked government offices, including a police station. Sporadic violence lasted for two days but even after it was tamped down demonstrations reportedly spread to other Turkomen-majority areas, including an adjacent province.

All this highlights the fact that non-Persian minorities in Iran have significant grievances that could come into play in the future. There are several other important minority populations in Iran:

Azeris (18 million)

About one in four Iranians are Azeris, living mostly in the northwest near Azerbaijan. Like the majority Persians, Azeris are predominantly Shiite Muslims, but speak a Turkic dialect. Azeri grievances center on preserving their language and culture. In 2006, large-scale riots erupted in Azeri areas due to a state-published cartoon depicting Azeris as cockroaches.

Kurds (4 million)

Mainly Sunni, the Kurds also live mostly in the northwest. As in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, many Kurdish Iranians advocate separatism, which engenders much tension with the central government. There are periodic, but frequent clashes between Kurds and Iranian security services, some deadly.

Arabs (3 million)

In the southwest, particularly Khuzestan province, Shiite Arabs press for greater autonomy and rights. Despite living amidst Iran's largest oil fields, many Arabs in Khuzestan (also called Ahwazis) live in poverty, fostering much resentment of Tehran. In 2006 clashes between police and pro-independence Arabs resulted in deaths. Tehran also claims British and U.S. covert action has contributed to unrest there.

Baluchis (3 to 4 million)

Another separatist-minded group, the Baluchis reside along the porous border with Pakistan. In this remote region, smuggling is an art form and government forces face a low-grade insurgency consisting of drug runners and militants. Last year, in Sistan-Baluchestan province, militants from the "Jundallah" group killed 18 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members.

The point is, Iran is not as monolithic as it appears. And just as internal tensions contributed greatly to the dissolution of the USSR, the Islamic Republic of Iran may also be subject to unraveling at the edges. But, should the United States exploit this? And if so, how? More on this next week.

Tad Trueblood has more than 20 years of experience in the military. He residens in Santa Clara.
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Inside Iran's secretive Qods Force

By CLAUDE SALHANI (Editor, Middle East Times) Published: January 14, 2008

Since 2003 Iran has spent billions of dollars in Iraq, mobilized vast government resources and unleashed the Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all in an effort to spread its hegemony and the Islamic revolution, according to sources in the Iranian resistance.

In a speech U.S. President George W. Bush delivered on Sunday in Abu Dhabi, the president called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terror." Bush said the Islamic republic "sends hundreds of millions of dollars to extremists around the world, while its own people face repression and economic hardship at home." He said Iran was seeking "to intimidate its neighbors with ballistic missiles and bellicose rhetoric."

Speaking at the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, Bush spoke to an audience made up of carefully selected government officials, students and academics about broader democracy in the Middle East, calling for reforms and proclaiming a "new era "founded on the equality of all people before God."

One of the U.S. president's objectives on this trip was to garner support against Iran, whose Revolutionary Guards nearly clashed with U.S. Navy units in the Strait of Hormuz last week.

The Qods Force, a part of the IRGC, is commanded by Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, who reports directly to the regime's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is an indication of the importance the Islamic republic gives the force.

Brig. Gen. Ahmed Foruzandeh is the No. 2 commander in the Qods Force and the commanding officer of the Ramazan garrison in western Iran, tasked with Iraqi affairs.

The Ramazan garrison has four tactical bases:


-- Fajr garrison in the southwestern city of Ahwaz
-- Zafar garrison in the western city of Kermanshah
-- Raad and Nasser garrisons in the northwestern cities of Marivan and Naqadeh.

These bases provide logistic support for Qods Force operations in Iraq.

In January 2007 Foruzandeh and Jafari Sahraroudi traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan to coordinate and brief Qods Force's surrogate terrorist groups in Iraq. They reportedly were among the list of those Qods Force officers and operatives targeted for arrest by U.S. forces during a raid last January in Arbil. The two, however, were reportedly tipped off by informants within the Iraqi security apparatus and managed to evade arrest.

Formed in 1990, the Qods (Jerusalem) Force is the most secretive, elite, and skilled unit of the Iranian regime's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Driven by Islamist fundamentalist ideology, the unit is considered to be the most sophisticated, well-funded state-sponsored terrorist outfit in the world, say sources in the Iranian resistance.

"It is Tehran's primary vehicle for conducting terrorism," said Alireza Jafarzadeh, author of author of "The Iran Threat," and who is close to the anti-mullah resistance, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.

The force is headquartered in the former site of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah, 52 U.S. diplomats were detained for 444 days.

"The Qods Force was originally called the Lebanon Corps, which engineered the suicide truck bomb attack on the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut in October 1983," said Jafarzadeh. The attack, considered to be the largest ever non-nuclear explosion at the time, killed 241 U.S. service personnel.

The Qods Force is made up of 12 directorates. Additionally, it has several international affairs units tasked with affairs in other countries. Non-Iranian operatives are trained in dozens of garrisons across Iran. Those include:

-- Imam Ali training base located north of Tehran
-- Khomeini training base near Pakdasht Township
-- Bahonar base near Karaj dam.

The Qods Force has six major garrisons along Iran's borders. The Ramazan garrison in Kermanshah (west) is tasked with operations in Iraq.


QODS FORCE IN IRAQ

In recent months the Qods Force has mainly focused on Iraq, which Jafarzadeh says it is viewed by the regime in Tehran "as the gateway to reach the rest of the Islamic world." The most senior IRGC generals, as well as thousands of personnel, are based in Ramadan garrison.

Intelligence and reconnaissance for the Qods Force is set up in Fajr garrison in the southwestern city of Ahwaz. A number of special squads have been established to collect intelligence on coalition forces. Fajr garrison commanders repeatedly travel to al-Amarah, Nassiriya, and Basra to make contact with their surrogate groups, according to information provided to the Middle East Times by Iranian opposition forces. The Fajr Garrison is sub-ordinate to Ramazan garrison.


QODS FORCE AND TEHRAN'S EMBASSY IN IRAQ

The Iranian Embassy in Baghdad, according to resistance sources, has played a major role in Tehran's overall plan in Iraq's turmoil since 2003.

"Hassan Kazemi Qomi is a top ranking Qods Force commander with a long record of service both in Afghanistan and Lebanon," said Jafarzadeh, who added that the Qods Force has a separate section in the embassy in Baghdad, and Qomi has his own team.

Bush has recently designated the Qods Force "a terrorist organization," under Executive Order 13224, for providing material support to terrorists.

Says Jafarzadeh: "It is the regime's primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists and Islamic militants to advance Iranian national interests. The Qods Force provides training, weapons, and financial support to surrogate groups and terrorist organizations including: Lebanese Hezbollah; Palestinian terrorists; Iraqi Shiite militant groups; the Taliban and Islamic militants in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere. The Qods Force plays a central -- yet often hidden -- role in security interests, including Iraq and Afghanistan."

Jafarzadeh said, "Qods Force officers often use various cover mechanisms -- including diplomatic, non-governmental organization, humanitarian, and media.

Last week, the al-Sharqiya satellite television station quoted a senior Iraqi security official as saying that "IRGC command has formed special units and has deployed new commanders in order to carry out extensive operations inside Iraq." The Iraqi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added: "The new units named 'special battalions' are in direct contact with Brigadier General Ghassem Suleimani, Iran's IRGC commander for the Qods Force and his senior deputies.

"The information obtained by the Iraqi security forces and Multi-National Force in Iraq shows that these units have been trained to attack the Awakening Councils in Iraq as their main targets," the report said.

Last Monday terrorists were reported to have kidnapped eight Awakening Council members and killed 14 other people in Baghdad attacks. The kidnappings are the latest of several recent attacks on Awakening Councils many of whom are recruited by the U.S. military's "Concerned Local Citizens Program" to work against al-Qaida in Iraq and other militias.

In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Ali Hosseini dismissed Bush's comments regarding Iran as "ineffective."
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IRAN'S LATEST ETHNIC REVOLT

By Amir Taheri ; New York Post

January 14, 2008 -- FACING ethnic revolts in both Baluchistan and Kurdistan, the last thing that Tehran might have wanted was a similar problem in another corner of Iran with a non-Persian majority.

Yet that seems to be happening in Golestan, one of Iran's 30 provinces, with the ethnic Turkmen community seething with anger against Tehran. It all started on Jan. 4, when a gunboat of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot and killed a 20-year-old Turkmen fisherman in the coastal waters of the Caspian Sea.

The authorities claim that the fisherman, one Hissmauddin Khadivar, had been part of an illegal fishing expedition whose 30 or so members were later arrested and that his death was an accident.

As news of the incident spread, bands of angry Turkmen, some armed with daggers and sticks, attacked government offices and set vehicles on fire. One group attacked a police station; another tried to lay siege to the local Revolutionary Guard barracks near the fishing port of Bandar-Turkmen.

Eyewitnesses say the riots lasted until late Sunday night (Jan. 6), ending after reinforcements flew in from other cities. Over the two days, more than 300 people were arrested and taken away to unknown destinations. A spokesman for the Turkmen Human Rights Group said dozens were injured. How many might have died is unclear, because the Guard took some of the injured with them, ostensibly for hospitalization in other towns.

In the following days, anti-government demonstrations rocked a number of other cities, including Gonbad Kavous and Quchan, where Turkmens are a majority. A state of emergency remains in force in Bandar Turkmen and Gonbad Kavous.

The Turkmen anger appears to have been so strong and widespread as to oblige the government in Ashgabat, capital of neighboring Turkmenistan, to stop its flow of natural gas to Iran, provoking a diplomatic tussle with Tehran.

Turkmens number around 2.2 million and form a majority in Golestan province. They are also present in North Khorassan (along the border with the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan) and the Caspian province of Mazandaran. Turkmens say Iran has gerrymandered them across four provinces to curtail their political influence by denying them the number of seats they might otherwise have won in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, Iran's ersatz parliament.

An Altaic people sharing racial roots with the Uzbeks, the Kazakh and the Kyrgyz, the Turkmens are easily distinguishable from other Iranians thanks to their skin color, slanted eyes and other Asiatic features. Their distinct languages, Yamut and Koklan, are related to Turkish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. And they are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, while some 86 percent of Iranians are Shiites.

In the 1920s, Iran's Turkmens rose in revolt and declared a Soviet Republic with support from Moscow. The short-lived republic was destroyed by Reza Khan, the general who became Iran's shah in 1925. Over 200 Turkmen chiefs were hanged and hundreds of families transported far from Turkmen territories. After the fall of the shah, the Turkmens again rose in revolt. Their so-called republic was soon crushed by the Revolutionary Guard, ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini to treat the rebels as "miscreants waging war on Allah." The Guard hanged hundreds of militants and threw thousands into prison camps until the mid-'90s.

Khadivar isn't the first Turkmen fisherman to be killed in an incident involving the Guard's naval units in the Caspian. Since Tehran banned unauthorized fishing in the inland sea in 1996, dozens of men in search of caviar-rich sturgeon have died in clashes with security forces.

Why did Khadivar's death trigger such anger? Some observers point to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies, which have produced a 17 percent inflation rate and thrown thousands out of work. Unemployment among the Turkmens is estimated at 40 percent, three times the official national rate.

Another grievance is the government's refusal to allow Turkmens even a toehold in local administration. All top jobs in Golestan and in Turkmen towns in other provinces are held by Shiites from other parts of Iran. The government prefers to employ migrant workers from Afghanistan and Baluchistan to work in the Turkmen area's vast state-owned cotton fields. And by making Caspian fishing a state monopoly, Iran has deprived many Turkmens of a traditional source of income.

Tehran has also imposed central control on water distribution from the River Atrak, reserving the bulk of it for state-owned farms and estates, owned by rich mullahs and Guard commanders, where few Turkmens work. Turkmen farmers, mostly smallholders, are left with little or no water.

Turkmens also complain of a massive government campaign to convert them to Shiism. While no permit is issued for building Sunni mosques, the number of Shiite places of prayer and mourning has multiplied in Turkmen towns and villages. Shiite mullahs from Qom conduct periodic conversion "raids" into Turkmen towns and villages, using the promise of jobs and perks as inducements.

Turkmens claim that they have the lowest life expectancy in Iran and that they are denied fair access to higher education. Those who manage to apply for university places are often turned away because they fail religious tests based on Shiism; their inadequate mastery of Persian reduces their chances further.

Tehran authorities blame the Turkmen revolt on "secessionists" and "counterrevolutionaries," allegedly supported by the United States. In fact, the revolt highlights the failure of a narrowly based ideological regime to understand the pluralist nature of Iranian society and the legitimate aspirations of its diverse component parts for dignity, equal opportunity and a fair share in decision-making.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01142008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/irans_latest_ethnic_revolt_876610.htm?page=0
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After Iraq

A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future

By Jeffrey Goldberg ; January/February 2008 Atlantic Monthly

Not long ago, in a decrepit prison in Iraqi Kurdistan, a senior interrogator with the Kurdish intelligence service decided, for my entertainment and edification, to introduce me to an al-Qaeda terrorist named Omar. “This one is crazy,” the interrogator said. “Don’t get close, or he’ll bite you.”

Omar was a Sunni Arab from a village outside Mosul; he was a short and weedy man, roughly 30 years old, who radiated a pure animal anger. He was also a relentless jabberer; he did not shut up from the moment we were introduced. I met him in an unventilated interrogation room that smelled of bleach and paint. He was handcuffed, and he cursed steadily, making appalling accusations about the sexual practices of the interrogator’s mother. He cursed the Kurds, in general, as pig-eaters, blasphemers, and American lackeys. As Omar ranted, the interrogator smiled. “I told you the Arabs don’t like the Kurds,” he said. I’ve known the interrogator for a while, and this is his perpetual theme: close proximity to Arabs has sabotaged Kurdish happiness.

Omar, the Kurds claim, was once an inconsequential deputy to the now-deceased terrorist chieftain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Omar disputed this characterization. By his own telling, he accomplished prodigies of terror against the pro-American Kurdish forces in the northern provinces of Iraq. “You are worse than the Americans,” he told his Kurdish interrogator. “You are the enemy of the Muslim nation. You are enemies of God.” The interrogator—I will not name him here, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment—sat sturdily opposite Omar, absorbing his invective for several minutes, absentmindedly paging through a copy of the Koran.

During a break in the tirade, the interrogator asked Omar, for my benefit, to rehearse his biography. Omar’s life was undistinguished. His father was a one-donkey farmer; Omar was educated in Saddam’s school system, which is to say he was hardly educated; he joined the army, and then Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group that operates along the Iranian frontier. And then, on the blackest of days, as he described it, he fell prisoner to the Kurds.

The interrogator asked me if I had any questions for Omar. Yes, I said: Have you been tortured in this prison?

“No,” he said.

“What would you do if you were to be released from prison right now?”

“I would get a knife and cut your head off,” he said.

At this, the interrogator smacked Omar across the face with the Koran.

Omar yelped in shock. The interrogator said: “Don’t talk that way to a guest!”

Now, Omar rounded the bend. A bolus of spit flew from his mouth as he screamed. The interrogator taunted Omar further. “This book of yours,” he said, waving the Koran. “‘Cut off their heads! Cut off their heads!’ That’s the answer for everything!” Omar cursed the interrogator’s mother once again; the interrogator trumped him by cursing the Prophet Muhammad’s mother.

The meeting was then adjourned.

In the hallway, I asked the interrogator, “Aren’t you Muslim?”

“Of course,” he said.

“But you’re not a big believer in the Koran?”

“The Koran’s OK,” he said. “I don’t have any criticism of Muhammad’s mother. I just say that to get him mad.”

He went on, “The Koran wasn’t written by God, you know. It was written by Arabs. The Arabs were imperialists, and they forced it on us.” This is a common belief among negligibly religious Kurds, of whom there are many millions.

“That’s your problem, then,” I said. “Arabs.”

“Of course,” he replied. “The Arabs are responsible for all our misfortunes.”

“What about the Turks?” I asked. It is the Turks, after all, who are incessantly threatening to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, which they decline to call “Iraqi Kurdistan,” in more or less the same obstreperous manner that they refuse to call the Armenian genocide a genocide.

“The Turks, too,” he said. “Everyone who denies us our right to be free is responsible for our misfortunes.”

We stepped out into the sun. “The Kurds never had friends. Now we have the most important friend, America. We’re closer to freeing ourselves from the Arabs than ever,” he said.

To the Kurds, the Arabs are bearers of great misfortune. The decades-long oppression of Iraq’s Kurds culminated during the rule of Saddam Hussein, whose Sunni Arab–dominated army committed genocide against them in the late 1980s. Yet their unfaltering faith that they will one day be free may soon be rewarded: the Kurds are finally edging close to independence. Much blood may be spilled as Kurdistan unhitches itself from Iraq—Turkey is famously sour on the idea of Kurdish independence, fearing a riptide of nationalist feeling among its own unhappy Kurds—but independence for Iraq’s Kurds seems, if not immediate, then in due course inevitable.

In many ways, the Kurds are functionally independent already. The Kurdish regional government has its own army, collects its own taxes, and negotiates its own oil deals. For the moment, Kurdish officials say they would be satisfied with membership in a loose-jointed federation with the Shiite and Sunni Arabs to their south. But in Erbil and Sulaymani, the two main cities of the Kurdish region, the Iraqi flag is banned from flying; Arabic is scarcely heard on the streets (and is never spoken by young people, who are happily ignorant of it), and Baghdad is referred to as a foreign capital. In October, when I was last in the region, I called the office of a high official of the peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrilla army, but was told that he had “gone to Iraq” for the week.

The Bush administration gave many reasons for the invasion of Iraq, but the satisfaction of Kurdish national desire was not one of them. Quite the opposite: the goal was, and remains, a unified, democratic Iraq. In fact, key officials of the administration have a history of indifference to, and ignorance of, the subject of Kurdish nationalism. At a conference in 2004, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated, “What has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis—whether Kurds or Shia or Sunni or the many other ethnic groups in Iraq—have demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq.” As Peter Galbraith, a former American diplomat and an advocate for Kurdish independence, has observed, Rice’s statement was disconnected from observable reality—shortly before she spoke, 80 percent of all Iraqi Kurdish adults had signed a petition calling for a vote on independence.

Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

As America approaches the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the list of the war’s unintended consequences is without end (as opposed to the list of intended consequences, which is, so far, vanishingly brief). The list includes, notably, the likelihood that the Kurds will achieve their independence and that Iraq will go the way of Gaul and be divided into three parts—but it also includes much more than that. Across the Middle East, and into south-central Asia, the intrinsically artificial qualities of several states have been brought into focus by the omnivorous American response to the attacks of 9/11; it is not just Iraq and Afghanistan that appear to be incoherent amalgamations of disparate tribes and territories. The precariousness of such states as Lebanon and Pakistan, of course, predates the invasion of Iraq. But the wars against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and especially Saddam Hussein have made the durability of the modern Middle East state system an open question in ways that it wasn’t a mere seven years ago.

It used to be that the most far-reaching and inventive question one could ask about the Middle East was this: How many states, one or two—Israel or a Palestinian state, or both—will one day exist on the slip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River?

Today, that question seems trivial when compared with this one: How many states will there one day be between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River? Three? Four? Five? Six? And why stop at the western bank of the Euphrates? Why not go all the way to the Indus River? Between the Mediterranean and the Indus today lie Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Long-term instability could lead to the breakup of many of these states.

All states are man-made. But some are more man-made than others. It was Winston Churchill (a bust of whom Bush keeps in the Oval Office) who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes—but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.

The British, together with the French, gave the world the modern Middle East. In addition to manufacturing the country now called Iraq, the grand Middle East settlement shrank Turkey by the middle of the 1920s to the size of the Anatolian peninsula; granted what are now Syria and Lebanon to the French; and kept Egypt under British control. The British also broke Palestine in two, calling its eastern portion Trans-Jordan and installing a Hashemite prince, Abdullah, as its ruler, and at the same time promising Western Palestine to the Jews, while implying to the Arabs there that it was their land, too. As the historian David Fromkin puts it in A Peace to End All Peace, his definitive account of the machinations among the Great Powers that resulted in the modern map of the Middle East, the region became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure.

Of course, the current turbulence in the Middle East is attributable also to factors beyond the miscalculations of both the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants Bush administration and the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants French and British empires. Among other things, there is the crisis within Islam, a religion whose doctrinal triumphalism—Muslims believe the Koran to be the final, authoritative word of God—is undermined daily by the global balance of power, with predictable and terrible consequences (see: the life of Mohammed Atta et al.); and there is the related and continuing crisis of globalization, which drives people who have not yet received the message that the world is now flat to find solace and meaning in their fundamental ethnic and religious identities.

But since 9/11, America’s interventions in the region—and especially in Iraq—have exacerbated the tensions there, and have laid bare how artificial, and how tenuously constructed, the current map of the Middle East really is. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration sought not only to deprive the country of its putative weapons of mass destruction, but also to shake things up in Iraq’s chaotic neighborhood; toppling Saddam and planting the seeds of democracy in Iraq would, it was hoped, make possible the transformation of the region. The region is being transformed; that transformation is just turning out to be a different, and possibly far broader, one than imagined. As Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East envoy for both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, and is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, puts it, the Iraq War has begun to produce “wholesale change”—but “it won’t be the one envisioned by the administration.” An independent Kurdistan would be just the start.

Envisioning what the Middle East might look like five or 10 or 50 years from now is by definition a speculative exercise. But precisely because of the scope of the transformation that’s under way, imagining the future of the region, and figuring out a smart approach to it, should be at the top of America’s post-Iraq priorities. At the moment, however, neither the Bush administration nor the candidates for the presidency seem to be thinking about the future of the Middle East (beyond the immediate situation in Iraq and the specific question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear intentions) in any particularly creative way. At the State Department and on the National Security Council, there is a poverty of imagination (to borrow a phrase from the debate about the causes of chronic intelligence failure) about the shifting map of the region.

It’s not just the fragility of the post-1922 borders that has been exposed by recent history; it’s also the limitations of the leading foreign-policy philosophies—realism and neoconservatism. Formulating a foreign policy after Iraq will require coming to terms with a reshaped Middle East, and thinking about it in new ways.

In an effort to understand the shape of things to come in the Middle East, I spent several weeks speaking with more than 25 experts and traveling to Iraq, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. Many of the conversations were colored, naturally, by the ideological predispositions of those I talked with. The realists quake at instability, which threatens (as they see it) the only real American interest in the Middle East, the uninterrupted flow of Arab oil. Iranophobes see that country’s empowerment, and the threat of regional Shiite-Sunni warfare, as the greatest cause for worry. Pro-Palestinian academics blame Israel, and its friends in Washington, for trying to force the collapse of the Arab state system. The liberal interventionists lament the poor execution of the Iraq War, and wish that the Bush administration had gone about exporting democracy to the Middle East with more subtlety and less hypocrisy. The neoconservatives, who cite the American Revolution as an example of what might be called “constructive volatility,” see no reason to regret instability (even as they concede that it’s hard to imagine a happy end to the Iraq War anytime soon).

Some experts didn’t want to play at all. When I called David Fromkin and asked him to speculate about the future of the Middle East, he said morosely, “The Middle East has no future.” And when I spoke to Edward Luttwak, the iconoclastic military historian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, he said there was no reason to engage the subject: the West is unable to shape the future of the Middle East, so why bother? “The United States could abandon Israel altogether, or embrace the general Arab cause 100 percent,” he said, but “the Arabs will find a new reason to be anti-American.”

Many experts I spoke to ventured that it would be foolish to predict what will happen in the Middle East next Tuesday, let alone in 2018, or in 2028—but that it would also be foolish not to be actively thinking about, and preparing for, what might come next.

So what might, in fact, come next? The most important first-order consequence of the Iraq invasion, envisioned by many of those I spoke to, is the possibility of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites for theological and political supremacy in the Middle East. This is a war that could be fought by proxies of Saudi Arabia, the Sunni flag-bearer, against Iran—or perhaps by Iran and Saudi Arabia themselves—on battlefields across Iraq, in Lebanon and Syria, and in Saudi Arabia’s largely Shiite Eastern Province, under which most of the kingdom’s oil lies. In 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Sunni, spoke of the creation of a Shiite “crescent,” running from Iran, through Iraq, and into Syria and Lebanon, that would destabilize the Arab world. Jordan, which is an indispensably important American ally, is a Sunni country, but its population is also majority-Palestinian, and many of those Palestinians support the Islamist Hamas movement, one of whose main sponsors is Shiite Iran.

There are likely second-order consequences, as well. Rampant Kurdish nationalism, unleashed by the invasion, may spill over into the Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. America’s reliance on anti-democratic regimes, such as Egypt’s, for help in its campaign against Islamist terrorism could strengthen the Islamist opposition in those countries. An American decision to confront Iran could have an enduring impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process—a tenuous undertaking to begin with—because the chief enemies of compromise are the Iranian-backed terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Then there are third-order consequences: in the next 20 years, new states could emerge as old ones shrink, fracture, or disappear. Khuzestan, a mostly Arab province of majority-Persian Iran, could become independent. Lebanon, whose existence is perpetually inexplicable, could become partly absorbed by Syria, whose future is also uncertain. The Alawites who rule Syria are members of a Shiite splinter sect, and they are a tiny minority in their own, mostly Sunni country (the Ala­wites briefly ruled an independent state in the mountains above the Mediterranean). Syria, out of a population of 20 million, has roughly 2 million Kurds, who are mostly indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to the government in Damascus.

Kuwait is another state whose future looks unstable; after all, it has already been subsumed once, and could be again—though, under another scenario, it could gain territory and population, if Iraq’s Sunnis seek an alliance with it as a way of protecting themselves from their country’s newly powerful Shiites. Bahrain, a majority-Shiite country ruled by Sunnis, could well be annexed by Iran (which already claims it), and Yemen could expand its territory at Saudi Arabia’s expense. And the next decades might see the birth of one or two Palestinian states—and, perhaps, the end of Israel as a Jewish state, a fervent dream of much of the Muslim world.

And let’s not forget Pakistan, whose artificiality I was reminded of by Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator, during an interview in the garrison city of Rawalpindi some years ago. At one point, he took exception to the idea that the Baluch, the quasi-nomadic people who inhabit the large deserts of Pakistan’s west (and Iran’s southeast), might feel unattached to the government in Islamabad. In so doing, he undermined the idea of Pakistan as a naturally unitary state. “I know many residents of Baluchistan who are appreciative of Pakistan and the many programs and the like that Pakistan has for Baluchistan,” he said, referring to one of his states as if it were another country. He continued: “Why [is Pakistan] thought of as artificial and not others? Didn’t your country almost come to an end in a civil war? You faced larger problems than we ever have.”

Musharraf also made passing reference to the Afghan-Pakistan border, the so-called Durand Line. It was named after the English official who in 1893 forced the Afghans to accept it as their border with British India, even though it sliced through the territory of a large ethnic group, the truculent Pashtuns, who dominate Afghan politics and warmaking and who have always disliked and, accordingly, disrespected the line. Musharraf warned about the hazards of even thinking about the line. “Why would there be such a desire to change existing situations?” he said. “There would be instability to come out of this situation, should this question be put on the table. It is best to leave borders alone. If you start asking about this and that border or this and that arrangement …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

All of this is very confusing, of course. Many Americans (including, until not so long ago, President Bush) do not know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni, let alone between a Sindhi and a Punjabi. Just try to imagine, say, Secretary of State Podhoretz briefing President Giuliani on his first meeting with the leaders of the Baluchistan Liberation Army, and it becomes obvious that we may be entering a new and hazardous era.

“Nobody is thinking about whether or not the map is still viable,” Ralph Peters told me. Peters is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and intelligence expert who writes frequent critiques of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. “It’s not a question about how America wants the map to look; it’s a question of how the map is going to look, whether we like it or not.”

In the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal, Peters published a map of what he thought a more logical Middle East might look like. Rather than following the European-drawn borders, he made his map by tracing the region’s “blood borders,” invisible lines that would separate battling ethnic and sectarian groups. He wrote of his map,

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Peters drew onto his map an independent Kurdistan and an abridged Turkey; he shrank Iran (handing over Khuzestan to an as-yet-imaginary Arab-Shiite state he carved out of what is now southern Iraq); he placed Jordan and Yemen on a steroid regimen; and he dismembered Saudi Arabia because he sees it as a primary enemy of Muslim modernization.

It was an act of knowing whimsy, he said. But it was seen by the Middle East’s more fevered minds as a window onto the American imperial planning process. “The reaction was pure paranoia, just hysterics,” Peters told me. “The Turks in particular got very upset.” Peters explained how he made the map. “The art department gave me a blank map, and I took a crayon and drew on it. After it came out, people started arguing on the Internet that this border should, in fact, be 50 miles this way, and that border 50 miles that way, but the width of the crayon itself was 200 miles.”

Given the preexisting sensitivities in the Middle East to white men wielding crayons, it’s not surprising that his map would be met with such anxiety. There is a belief, prevalent in the Middle East and among pro-Palestinian American academics, that the Bush administration’s actual goal—or the goal, at least, of its favored theoreticians—is to rip up the existing map of the Arab Middle East in order to help Israel.

“One of the most evil things that is happening is that a bunch of people who are fundamentally opposed to the existence of these nation-states have gotten into the control room,” Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, told me. “They are irresponsible and highly ideological neoconservatives, generally, and they have been trying to smash the Arab state system. Their basic philosophy is, the smaller the Arab state, the better.”

Neoconservatives inside the administration deny this. “We never had the creation of new states as a goal,” Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, told me, and indeed, there is no proof that the administration sought the breakup of Iraq. On the contrary: shortly after the invasion, I saw Paul Wolfo­witz, then the deputy secretary of defense, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and I told him I had just returned from Kurdistan. Maybe he was just feeling snappish (a few minutes earlier he had had a confrontation with Al Franken that ended with Wolfo­witz saying “Fuck you” to the comedian), but Wolfo­witz looked at me and, as though he were channeling the Turkish foreign minister, said, “We call it northern Iraq. Northern Iraq.”

Peters said he noticed early on as well that the administration was committed to a unified Iraq, and to the preexisting, European-drawn map of the Middle East. “This is how strange things are—the greatest force for democracy in the world has signed up for the maintenance of the European model of the world,” he said. “Even the neocons, who look like revolutionaries, just want to substitute Bourbons for Hapsburgs,” he continued, and added, “Not just in Iraq.” (Peters acknowledged that neoconservatives outside the administration were more radical than those on the inside, like Feith and Wolfowitz.)

So just what did the neoconservatives, the most influential foreign-policy school of the Bush years, have in mind? Feith, whose (inevitable) book on the invasion and its aftermath will be published in March, told me that the neoconservatives—at least those inside the administration—did not hope to create new borders, but did see a value in “instability,” especially since, in his view, the Middle East was already destabilized by the presence of Saddam Hussein. “There is something I once heard attributed to Goethe,” he said, “that ‘Disorder is worse than injustice.’ We have an interest in stability, of course, but we should not overemphasize the value of stability when there is an opportunity to make the world a better or safer place for us. For example, during the Nixon presidency, and the George H. W. Bush presidency, the emphasis was on stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, the goal was to put the Communists on the ash heap of history. Those Americans who argued for stability tried to preserve the Soviet Union. But it was Reagan who was right.” Feith had hoped that the demise of Iraq’s Baath regime would allow a new sort of governance to take hold in an Arab country. “We understood that if you did something as big as replacing Saddam, then there are going to be all kinds of consequences, many of which you can’t possibly anticipate. Something good may come, something negative might come out.”

So far, it’s been mainly negative. The neoconservatives’ big idea was that American-style democracy would quickly take hold in Iraq, spread through the Arab Middle East, and then be followed by the collapse of al-Qaeda, who would no longer have American-backed authoritarian Arab regimes to rally against. But democracy has turned out to be a habit not easily cultivated, and the idea that Arab political culture is capable of absorbing democratic notions of governance has fallen into disfavor.

In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”

After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.

“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”

It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

It is conceivable, if paradoxical, that the actual outcome of the recent turmoil in the Middle East could be a new era of stability, fostered by realists in this country and in the region itself. This might be the most unlikely potential outcome of the Iraq invasion—that it turns out to be the Seinfeld War, a war about nothing (except, of course, the loss of a great many lives and vast sums of money). Everything changes if America attacks Iranian nuclear sites, of course—but the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which came out in early December and reported that Iran had shut down its covert nuclear- weapons program in 2003, makes it unlikely that the Bush administration will pursue this option. And the next one or two U.S. presidents, who will be inheriting both the Iraq and Afghanistan portfolios, will probably be hesitant to attack any more Muslim countries. It’s not impossible to imagine that, in 20 years, the map of the Middle East will look exactly like it does today.

“We tend to underestimate the power of states,” Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. “The PC way of looking at the 21st century is that non-state actors—al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, general chaos—have replaced states as the key players in the Middle East. But states are more resilient than that.” He added that a newfound fear of instability might even buttress existing states.

Jordan is an interesting example of this phenomenon. While it would seem eminently vulnerable to the chaos—Iraq is to its east, the Palestinians and Israel to its west, and Syria to the north—Jordan is, in fact, almost tranquil, in part because it is led by a savvy king (scion of a family, the Hashemites, who are quite used to living on the balls of their feet) and in part because most of its people, having viewed from orchestra seats the bedlam in Iraq, want quiet, even if that means forgoing all the features of Western democracy.

Jordan might be an exception, however. Even a passing look at a country like Saudi Arabia suggests that internally driven regime changes are real possibilities. In Egypt the aging Hosni Mubarak is trying to engineer his unproven younger son, Gamal, into the presidency. It does not seem likely, at the moment, that Gamal would succeed in the job. Egypt was once a country that could project its power into Syria; now its leaders are having trouble controlling the Sinai Peninsula, home to a couple hundred thousand Bedouin, who are Pashtun-like in their stiff-neckedness and who seem more and more unwilling to accept Cairo’s rule. America, of course, continues to embrace Mubarak, seeing no alternative except the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. This pattern is familiar in American diplomacy; President Bush’s long embrace of Musharraf comes to mind, and there are various, bipartisan antecedents—such as, most notably, Jimmy Carter’s support for the Shah of Iran.

Beyond Realism and Neoconservatism

In the years since his Iraq project fell into disrepair, President Bush has acted like a realist while speaking like a utopian neoconservative. He has touted the virtues of democracy to the very people subjugated by pro-American dictators. This is probably not a good long-term policy for managing chaos in the Middle East.

The problem is that Iraq has already proven—and Iran continues to prove—that Americans cannot make Middle Easterners do what is in America’s best interest. “Whether the Middle East is unimportant or terrifically important, when it comes to doing anything about it, the actions undertaken are all ineffectual or counterproductive,” Edward Luttwak told me. “In the Middle East, it doesn’t help to be nice to them, or to bomb them.”

A first step in restoring America’s influence in the Middle East is to accept with humility the notion that America—like Britain before it—cannot organize the re­gion according to its own interests. (Ideologues of varying positions tend to quote for their own benefit the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the proper use of American power—but perhaps what the debate needs is a version of Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the courage to change the regimes I can, the grace to accept the regimes I can’t …”) What’s called for is a foreign policy in which the neoconservative’s belief in the liberating power of democ­racy is yoked to the realist’s understanding of unintended consequences.

Of course, winning in Iraq—or at least not losing— would help fortify America’s deterrent power, and check Iran’s involvement in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere. America’s situation in Iraq is not quite so dire as it was a year ago; the troop surge has worked to suppress much violence, and there have been tentative steps by both Shiite and Sunni leaders to prevent all-out sectarian war. To be sure, very few experts predict with any assurance an optimistic future for Iraq. “Ten years is a reasonable time period to think that the sectarian conflict will need to play out,” Martin Indyk, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told me. “The parties will eventually exhaust themselves. Perhaps they have already, although I fear that the surge has just provided a break for Sunnis and Shias to better position themselves for further conflict when American forces are drawn down. There’s no indication yet that the Shias are prepared to share power or that the Sunnis are prepared to live as a minority under Shia majoritarian rule.”

Erstwhile optimists about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, myself included, have been chastened by recent events. But the U.S. would do well not to abandon the long-term hope that democracy, exported carefully, and slowly, can change reality. This would be not a five-year project, but a 50-year one. It would focus on aiding Middle Eastern journalists and democracy activists, on building strong universities and independent judiciaries—and on being discerning enough not to aid Muslim democracy activists when American help would undermine their credibility. If Arab moderates and democrats “begin this work now, in 10 or 15 years we will have a horse in this race,” said Omran Salman, the head of an Arab reform organization called Aafaq. “We’ve sacrificed democracy for stability, but it’s a fabricated stability. When someone’s sitting on your head, it’s not stable.” Salman, a Shiite from Bahrain, said he opposes Western military intervention in certain cases, preferring American “moral intervention.” The Americans “have to keep pressure on regimes to force them to make reforms and open their societies. Now what the regimes do is oppress liberals.”

One problem is that American moral capital has been depleted, which only underscores the practical importance to national security of, among other things, banning torture, and considering carefully the impact an American strike on Iran would have on the typical Iranian. After 30 years of oppressive fundamentalist Muslim rule, many of Iran’s people are pro-American; that could change, however, if American bombs begin to fall on their country.

The Next Phase

There is a way to go beyond merely managing the current instability, and to capitalize on it. I’m aware that this is not the most opportune moment in American history to disinter Wilsonian idealism, but America does now have the chance to help right some historic wrongs—for one thing, wrongs committed against the Kurds. (There are other peoples, of course, in the Middle East that the U.S. could stand up for, if it weren’t quite so committed to the preservation of the existing map; the blacks in the south of Sudan—one of the most disastrous countries created by Europe—would surely like to be free from the Arab government that rules them from Khartoum.)

Iraq has been unstable since its creation because its Kurds and Shiites did not want to be ruled from Baghdad by a Sunni minority. So why not remove one source of instability—the perennially oppressed Kurds—from the formula? Kurdish independence was—literally—one of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points (No. 12, to be precise), and it is quite obviously a moral cause (and no less moral than the cause that preoccupies the West—that of Palestinian independence). There is danger here, of course: Kurdish freedom might spark secessionist impulses among other Middle Eastern ethnic groups. But these impulses already exist, and one lesson from the British and French management of the Middle East is that people cannot be suppressed forever.

For the moment, the Kurds of Iraq are playing the American game, officially supporting the U.S. and its flawed vision of Iraqi federalism, in part because the Turks fear Kurdish independence. Turkey has been an important American ally except for the one time when Turkey’s friendship would have truly mattered—at the outset of the Iraq War, when Turkey refused to let the American 4th Infantry Division invade northern Iraq from its territory. The U.S. does not owe Turkey quite as much as its advocates think. The Kurds, on the other hand, are the most stalwart U.S. allies in Iraq, and their leaders are certainly the most responsible, working for the country’s unity even while hoping for something better for their own people. “If Iraq fails, no one will be able to blame the Kurds,” said Barham Salih, a Kurd who is Iraq’s deputy prime minister.

The next phase of Middle East history could start 160 miles north of Baghdad, in Kirkuk, which the Kurds consider their Jerusalem. One day, in the home of Abdul Rahman Mustafa, the Kurdish-Iraqi governor there, I learned about the mature position the Kurds are adopting. Over the course of its 20 years, Saddam’s regime expelled Kurds from Kirkuk and gave their homes to Arabs from the south. The government now is slowly—too slowly for many Kurds—reversing the expulsions. A group of dignitaries had come to see the governor on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. To reach the governor’s office, you must navigate an endless series of barricades manned by tense-seeming Kurdish soldiers. The house itself is surrounded by blast walls. Kirkuk has a vigorous Sunni terrorist underground, and an enormous car bomb had killed seven people the day before.

I asked the governor, who is an unexcitable lawyer of about 60, if “his people”—I phrased it this way—were seeking independence from Iraq. “My people,” he said, “are all the people of Kirkuk.” The men seated about his living room nodded in agreement. “My job is to help all the people of Kirkuk have better lives.” More nodding. “My friends here all know that we will have justice for those who were hurt in the regime of Saddam, but we will not hurt others in order to get justice.” Even more nodding, and mumblings of approval.

Four men eventually got up to leave. They kissed the governor and then left the house. The governor turned to me and said, “One of those men is Arab. Everyone is welcome here.”

I told him I would like to ask my question again. “Do your people want independence from Iraq?”

“Yes, of course my people, most of them, want a new, different situation,” he said. “I think—I will be careful now—I think that we will have what we need soon. Please don’t ask me any more specific questions about what we need and want.”

I asked, instead, for his analysis of the situation—did he think the Sunni-Shiite struggle would become worse, or would it burn out? He laughed. “I cannot predict anything about this country. I would never have predicted that I would be governor of Kirkuk. This is a city that expelled Kurds like me until the Americans came. So I couldn’t predict my own future. I only know that we won’t go back to the way it was before.”

He went on, “I listen to television about the future, but I don’t believe anything I hear.”

Later that evening, as I was looking over my notes of the conversation, I recalled another comment, made by a man who thought he understood the Middle East. A little over a year ago, I ran into Paul Bremer, the ex–grand vizier of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the man who disbanded the Iraqi army, among other achievements. We were at Reagan National Airport; it was the day after the Iraq Study Group report was released, and I asked Bremer what he thought of it. He said he had not yet read it. I told him that from what I could tell, the experts were already divided on its recommendations. Bremer laughed, and said, with what I’m fairly sure was a complete lack of self-awareness, “Who really is an Iraq expert, anyway?”
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Welcoming a tyrant

Pakistan's President Musharraf is running a state terrorist regime, with the backing of both Britain and the US

By Peter Tatchell ; January 24, 2008 ;

The Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf is in Britain to drum up support for his tyrannical regime. His visit is a desperate PR ploy, designed to repair the damage caused by his repressive policies. These include the imposition of emergency rule late last year, which led to media censorship, violent suppression of popular protests, mass arrests of opposition party leaders and activists, and the crushing of the independent judiciary, with the detention of over 60 supreme court judges and lawyers.

Musharraf misleadingly justified emergency rule in the name of a crackdown on terrorism. In truth, instead of arresting terrorists, he seized thousands of peaceful opposition party officials and members. Since Benazir Bhutto's assassination, tens of thousands more have been detained.

Gordon Brown refuses to meet the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, but on Monday he will embrace Musharraf of Pakistan at 10 Downing Street. No surprise there. After all, Britain and the US are long-time allies and supporters of Musharraf's dictatorship. Despite occasional mild admonishments, our government, in our name, supports him politically, diplomatically, economically and militarily; selling Musharraf the weapons he uses to suppress his own people. Since 2001, the US has bankrolled Musharraf to the tune of $10bn. US fighter planes are used to bomb and strafe pro-nationalist towns and villages in annexed and colonised Baluchistan. Without western aid to support this state terrorism, Musharraf's regime would fall.

Musharraf will, as usual, claim that he is saving Pakistan from Islamic fundamentalism and holding the fort against the terror threat of al-Qaida and the Taliban. He will portray the "tribal regions" of Pakistan, like Waziristan and North West Frontier, as hotbeds of extremism and terrorism that only he can control; wilfully suppressing all knowledge of the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by his subjugating army in the these regions and the legitimate liberation struggles of the people there.

Our prime minister will fall for this hogwash and spin. He will parrot Islamabad's line that we need Musharraf as an ally in the so-called "war on terror" and that without him the country would be taken over by Islamist extremists.

Nonsense. The extremists are already in the Pakistani government, army, police and intelligence services. These state agencies are heavily infiltrated by fundamentalists and Musharraf has failed to remove them.

Moreover, if there were free and fair elections, the opposition parties would win and could start addressing some of the underlying injustices in Pakistani society that have allowed fundamentalist ideas to gain a foothold. Democracy is the best safeguard against dictatorship, whether of the Musharraf or Islamist variety.

The elephant in the room during Monday's Downing Street meeting with Gordon Brown will be Musharraf's complicity in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the subsequent attempted cover-up.

The Pakistani leader has form with regard to political assassinations. In 2006, his forces murdered the frail 79-year-old Baluchistan nationalist leader, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a former provincial governor and chief minister of Baluchistan. Previously an independent nation, Baluchistan was invaded and occupied by Pakistan in 1948. Another Baluch leader, Balach Marri, was killed by Pakistani forces last November.

So far as Bhutto's murder is concerned, Musharraf was the main beneficiary. He has gained the most from her death. She was his main political rival and a likely election winner. With Bhutto dead, Musharraf's chances of election in next month's poll are much improved.

Musharraf is a guilty man. Three scenarios of guilt are possible. Either he personally ordered Bhutto's assassination or he failed to control the rogue elements in the military and intelligence services that killed her. Even if Islamist radicals murdered her, he neglected to provide Bhutto with adequate personal security and he refused her requests for greater protection. Either way, to varying degrees, Musharraf was complicit in Benazir's assassination. The buck stops with him.

Musharraf has, however, preferred to pin the blame on the rebel leader Baitullah Mehsud - a claim endorsed by the US Central Intelligence Agency, although the CIA has not revealed its evidence or sources. But a spokesman for Baitullah Mehsud has specifically denied responsibility, accusing in turn "the secret agencies" of the state.

While there is good reason to be sceptical of such denials, in the past Mehsud has never been shy of claiming responsibility for his military operations. Moreover, he stood to gain from Bhutto's election. She had, after all, promised greater autonomy for the provinces and an end to Musharraf's brutal suppression of minority tribes and nationalities. Although Mehsud may have ordered the assassination, it seems doubtful.

Gordon Brown's willingness to fete a despot like Musharraf is an insult to the millions of Pakistani people who oppose tyranny and yearn for democracy and human rights. New Labour is yet again colluding with oppression. It is siding with a dictator against his victims.

When the prime minister embraces Musharraf on Monday, I will be joining the Pakistani protests outside Downing Street at 11am. We will be there in solidarity with the people of Pakistan who want an end to Musharraf's dictatorship. I hope some of you will join us.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2008/01/welcoming_a_tyrant.html

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Security official urges U.S. to try to influence Iran public opinion

January 21, 2008 ; http://www.haaretz.com

By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and the Associated Press

A high-ranking Israeli security official has called on the United States and its allies to expand efforts to influence public opinion in Iran and to transfer messages to the public against the current Iranian regime.

During a meeting held recently with members of the U.S. intelligence and security establishment, the official said he does not believe the U.S. is doing enough to initiate dialogue or pass messages to the varied ethnic groups and dissidents in Iran.

The officials argued that greater investment in influencing Iranian public opinion could bring domestic turmoil that could topple the current regime.

The Iranian population is only around 50 percent Persian, with Azeris making up 25 percent of the population, while Kurds, Arabs and various other ethnic groups constitute the rest.

These groups' interests do not always coincide with the policies of the current regime and the official argued that concerted efforts influence domestic politics in Iran could bring regime change.

Fourth Russian shipment of nuclear fuel arrives in Iran
A fourth Russian shipment of nuclear fuel arrived in Iran on Sunday, destined for a power plant being constructed in the southern Iranian port of Bushehr, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The report said 11 tons of fuel arrived at the Bushehr power plant, just two days after Iran received its third Russian shipment on Friday.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said earlier this month that Israel is concerned the Russian fuel deliveries might help Tehran in achieving nuclear weapons, which Israel accuses Iran of developing covertly.

Tehran, however, says its nuclear program is for civilian use only.

Russia has reportedly pledged to give Iran a total of 85 tons of nuclear fuel for the plant.

The remainder of the fuel, about 40 tons, was scheduled to arrive in four separate shipments in the coming months, the report said.

Iran received its first two shipments of nuclear fuel from Russia in December - after months of disputes between the two countries, allegedly over delayed construction payments for the reactor.

Iran has said Bushehr, the country's first nuclear reactor, will begin operating in the summer of 2008, producing half of its 1,000 megawatt capacity of electricity.

Tehran heralded the first shipment as a victory, saying it proved its nuclear program was peaceful and not a cover for weapons development as the United States has claimed.

The U.S. and Russia have said the supply of nuclear fuel meant Iran had no need to continue its uranium enrichment program - a process that can provide fuel for a reactor or fissile material for a bomb. Iran has agreed with Russia to return the spent fuel to ensure it doesn't extract plutonium to build a bomb.

Iran insisted it would continue enriching uranium because it needed to provide fuel to a 300-megawatt light-water reactor it was building in the southwestern town of Darkhovin.

Iranian officials have said they plan to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity through nuclear energy in the next two decades.

Russia's decision to begin shipping nuclear fuel to Iran followed a U.S. intelligence report released last month that concluded Tehran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and had not resumed it since.