ORTHODOX JEWS PROTEST AGAINST ZIONIST GOVERNMENT | |||
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May 17, 2010 - New York Thousands of Orthodox Jews demonstrated yesterday May 17, 2010 in front of the Israeli embassies in New York City, Montreal and London, against the Zionist government's destruction of an ancient Jewish cemetery in the city of Ashkelon. The Zionist government has proceeded with plans to enlarge the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon by destroying an ancient cemetery. Thirty graves, identified by experts as Jewish graves from the Second Temple era, were evacuated by archaeologists. Beginning Saturday night, the government began bulldozing the entire lot, which certainly contains countless more graves. "According to the Torah, Jews are currently in exile and are not permitted to have a state of their own. Therefore, Orthodox Jews who believe in the Torah never took part in the Zionist movement and its state. This is the reason for the bitter irony that the state calling itself Jewish is run by people who deny all of Judaism's basic principles," said Rabbi Elchonon Beck, a spokesman for Neturei Karta International. "One of those principles is the immortality of the soul, its reward and punishment after death, and the eventual resurrection of body and soul together. That is why we are commanded to treat human remains with the greatest respect. It is forbidden to move bones, and it is an even greater offense to grind them in the blades of a tractor. We are appalled by the actions of the state calling itself Israel, which lacks the decency and respect for human dignity that most countries of the world practice." "Furthermore, there are Jewish cemeteries in other countries that are in danger of destruction. When we appeal to those governments to save our cemeteries, why should they listen when they see that the so-called Jewish state has no problem with destroying its cemeteries? "This wicked act is just another link in the chain of violence and murder perpetrated by the Zionists, against Orthodox Jews and Arabs alike, ever since their founding. The Zionists destroyed hundreds of Arab villages, stealing their land and expelling the inhabitants to neighboring lands. These refugees have already spent 62 years living in tents under wretched conditions. The Zionists also killed very many innocent people who stood in their way, and for 62 years running they have oppressed the Arab population living under their government. "The Zionists want to put an end to Jewish religious observance. They arrest religious Jews and keep them in prison, or use other brutal methods - even murder - against anyone who stands up against them. The fact that they desecrate that which is holy to Jews, and the fact that they treat Orthodox Jews brutally, is the greatest proof that 1) they do not represent the Torah; 2) they do not represent Orthodox Jews; 3) their goal is not the wellbeing of Jews, only their own political aspirations. They attempt to transform Judaism, a religious concept, into a nationalist concept, empty of Torah and dedication to the Almighty - which have always been the outstanding qualities of the Jewish people. After all this, they have the nerve to call themselves "Israel" and base their claims to the land on the Torah - they same Torah that they so proudly desecrate! "They use the Almighty's promise of the Holy Land, and at the same time they laugh in His face and violate His law. The Almighty commanded us to go into exile, and with three oaths forbade us to create our own country before the coming of the messiah, when the redemption of the world will take place and all mankind will willingly worship the One G-d. "Torah Jewry and all authentic rabbis of the world have fought against Zionism since its founding day. Torah Jews will never recognize Zionist sovereignty over the Holy Land. "Zionists arrogantly claim that they have created a safe haven for the Jewish people, but their actions have brought about just the opposite: through their provocations against the strongest countries of the world and their leaders, they have brought the Jewish people into terrible danger. They have aroused anti-Semitism on a new scale everywhere, especially among peoples who throughout history have been hospitable to the Jews. "True authentic Jews remain loyal to the Almighty and His Torah, and accept the decree of exile lovingly, knowing that it is for our own good. We are loyal to the governments under which we live, and we do not provoke them or do anything against their interest. "The only solution to the Middle East problem is the peaceful dismantlement of the Zionist state as soon as possible. The entire land must be given back to its original inhabitants, the Palestinians, and only then will Jews and Arabs be able to live side by side in peace under a Palestinian government, as they lived in peace together for many generations in all the Arab lands. May we merit the redemption through the messiah, soon in our days, amen." In the Holy Land, at least 30 Orthodox demonstrators were arrested late Saturday and Sunday as they protested the bulldozing of the construction site. Police tackled protesters who attempted to climb fences and stop work. Police also sprayed protestors with a type of gas, causing them to faint on the spot. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, demonstrators blocked roads and set fire to garbage bins late Saturday night in anger at the Zionists' disrespect for human remains. Plans for the new wing of the hospital, which is to serve as an emergency room, have been in the making for more than three years. When the ancient graves were discovered, which experts identified by their shape and style as Jewish graves from the Second Temple era, Orthodox Jewish groups asked that the emergency room be built in a different place. Engineers proposed several alternative plans, none of which the government adopted. Yaakov Litzman, Deputy Minister of Health in the Zionist government, told Rabbi Dovid Shmidel, head of Asra Kadisha, an organization to save ancient cemeteries, that in reality the government cannot afford to build the emergency room. "They will probably not build it now in any case," he said. "They are only bulldozing the area in order to create facts on the ground and put the opposition of the religious community behind them." Aside from today's demonstration in Montreal, demonstrations were held at 2:00 PM yesterday and today in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York City. Other demonstrations were in London, England and Montreal, Quebec Canada | |||
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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting
Friday, May 21, 2010
ORTHODOX JEWS PROTEST AGAINST ZIONIST GOVERNMENT-17 MAY 2010
Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide?
Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide?
by Tony Klug
Even posing the question is painful, for after all the suffering anti-Semitism has caused the Jewish people over the centuries, the last thing we need or deserve is to have it become a permanent state of affairs. Nonetheless, the proposition that the State of Israel, which was conceived as a way of normalizing relations between Jews and all other peoples, might instead be normalizing anti-Semitism is not one we can simply close our eyes to in the forlorn hope that it will go away of its own accord.
I realize I may be stepping near the knuckle here. As Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest might have said, "To take on one controversial topic may be regarded as a misfortune; to combine two controversial topics looks like carelessness." However, to my mind, the two topics (Israeli policies and anti-Semitism) are not separate and unrelated but ineluctably converging—an inference I draw reluctantly from my forty years of engagement on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. I believe that the danger signals are flashing and that it is important to be candid about these matters at these uncertain times.
The Other Alleged Culprits
Our starting point—regrettably not a controversial one—is that there has been a disturbing rise of anti-Jewish sentiment around the world in recent years. Reports of this rise may occasionally be exaggerated or distorted, but they are not invented out of thin air. But why has this come about?
Some say it is the fault of extremist Muslims, or of large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe and other Western countries, or even of Islam itself and its holy book, the Qur'an. Others widen the net of fault to blame "spineless" Western governments and their smug, predominantly Christian populations who, they say, have always harbored anti-Semitic feelings anyway. Yet others accuse human rights groups of betraying their mission and developing—along with almost the entire NGO sector, the mass media, the trade unions, and the universities—an almost exclusive obsession about Israel, the "stand-in collective Jew."
Finally, there are the alleged "self-hating Jews"—Jews accused of being ashamed of their origins and of turning their backs on their people in order to ingratiate themselves to others. The accusation is facile and commonly offensive, as many Jews who are on its receiving end—a constantly expanding number, apparently—draw largely on such traditional Jewish values as justice, peace, truth, human dignity, and rightful treatment of the stranger ("for you were strangers in the land of Egypt") for their inspiration. These values—with which I am quite familiar as they were daily drilled into me at the orthodox Jewish school I attended between the ages of five and eighteen—are trashed virtually every time the "self-hating" accusation is leveled. In most cases, the accusation (whatever it is supposed to mean exactly) is made not because there is any basis for it, but because it meets the self-serving purpose of enabling the accuser to deflect mounting inconvenient realities.
A novel recent addition to those labeled as members of the "self-hating" community are the Israeli government officials responsible for overseeing Prime Minister Netanyahu's partial construction freeze, whom disgruntled West Bank settlers have greeted as "anti-Semites."
Altogether, this adds up to a large number of people supposedly out of step. With so many alleged anti-Semites around, is it any wonder there are Jews who feel paranoid? But, then again, are we not primed to see ourselves as the perennial victims when, at the annual Seder table, we recite the passage from the Pesach Haggadah that warns, "Not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us"? If we take this adage to heart—as a statement as much about the present and future as about the past—are not all the above groups just bit players merely acting out their scripted parts?
It's not that there is nothing to any of this. Indeed, the Jews have had more than their fair share of adversity since time immemorial, and there are still plenty of authentic anti-Semites around, doubtless rather enjoying the moment. But maybe some introspection on our part is also warranted. Is it possible that we ourselves have in some way contributed in recent times to the overt rise in Jewish unpopularity? It's a tricky question, as minority groups throughout history have habitually been accused of causing the prejudice from which they suffer, a slur the browbeaten Jews of Europe, among others, stoically endured over many generations. Yet, again, in the contemporary reality, it's a question we cannot simply shield ourselves from on the back of a convenient, if often legitimate, principle.
Definition Creep: Are We Changing the Meaning of "Anti-Semitism"?
If by anti-Semitism we mean an irrational hatred of Jews, or an underlying prejudice or contempt for all things Jewish, can there be such a thing as an antipathy to Jews or Jewish causes that is not irrational—even if some Jews find it upsetting? The answer would be "no, never" only if we define antagonism to virtually any Jewish endeavor—let's say Jewish schools in the educational sphere—as necessarily a form of "anti-Semitism." Such a generalization would clearly be stretching the meaning of the term too far.
In the political arena, pertinent examples could range from disparaging the policies and practices of the Israeli government, through contesting Zionism as a political ideology, to questioning the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Such challenges, in particular the latter two, are bound to make many supporters of Israel feel uncomfortable, even outraged. That's understandable, but are the critics necessarily driven by anti-Semitism? To corral them into this fold by slapping on the prefix "new"—as in "new anti-Semitism"—is not only simplistic and muddling, but it also risks trivializing past Jewish suffering, as well as genuine instances of anti-Semitism today, and it generally debases the currency.
Not only this, but many Jews, religiously observant or secular, within Israel and without, would suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of this "definition creep." So too, retrospectively, would past luminaries of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, leading figures of which, prior to the establishment of the Israeli state, were outspokenly anti-Zionist. Should they therefore now be deemed anti-Semitic, or newly anti-Semitic?
As with any phenomenon, stretching the definition of anti-Semitism is bound to make it appear more prevalent than it really is by inflating the figures and expanding the fear factor. More ominously, it can obscure the real situation. Worse still, it can pervert it, as we saw in November last year when certain Zionist circles in Britain courted two far-Right members of the European Parliament, one from Poland and the other from Latvia, who had been accused of blatant neo-Nazi associations in the past and of distinct anti-Semitic proclivities more recently. This tendency was again in evidence the following month when two right-wing Hungarian politicians, who had made very disparaging comments about their country's Jews, participated in the annual Global Forum to Combat Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem, sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. There was a time when Jews and official Jewish bodies would not go near such people with a bargepole. However, their records as "friends of the Jews" have been defended partly on the ground that their political parties can be relied on to take Israel's side on resolutions at the European Parliament. (Why they do this is a matter of debate, although it may have something to do with many modern-day fascists apparently hating Muslims more than they hate Jews and seeing them as the greater threat.)
There may be a parallel here with the posture of the chairman of the far-Right British National Party, Nick Griffin, who, when he appeared on BBC Television's Question Time in October 2009, disavowed his anti-Semitic past by claiming that his party was "the only political party which, in the clashes between Israel and Gaza, stood full square behind Israel's right to deal with Hamas terrorists." In all of these cases, professed support for Israel or Israeli actions is employed to relieve the charge of anti-Semitism, even by an avid anti-Semite with a record of Holocaust denial.
Among Israel's most impassioned partisans on the other side of the Atlantic are members of the ardently pro-Zionist, evangelical Christian Right in the United States. For them,aliyah (immigration of Jews to the holy land) should not let up until every Jew lives in Israel, and settlement building in "Judea and Samaria" should not cease until the entire West Bank is colonized by the Jewish people. Then the conditions would be right for the "rapture," at which point all Jews would have to choose between conversion to the true faith of Christianity or perishing forthwith. Ultimately—quite literally—this creed is deeply anti-Semitic. But its purveyors are sought out and serenaded by many of the influential pro-Zionist Jewish lobbies in America and by the Israeli government. They are, after all, through their ostensible support for even the most outrageous Israeli policies, proven "friends of the Jews."
To summarize, it now seems that it is the stance that groups and individuals take toward the Israeli state and the policies of its government of the day, that is becoming, bit by bit, the standard by which anti-Semitism is measured and assessed, steadily replacing the former gold standard of enmity toward the Jews qua Jews. Traditional anti-Semites are no longer—necessarily—anti-Semites. They may even be regarded as philo-Semites. Their place has been taken by people who have no quarrel with Jews qua Jews but do have a problem with the behavior and the policies of the political leadership in Israel, particularly with regard to its actions in occupied Palestinian territory. Some of them may even have a problem with the whole idea of a Jewish state. They, in this worldview, are fast becoming the new anti-Semites.
Unquestionably Genuine Anti-Semitism
None of the above is to say that anti-Zionism or hostility to Israel is not sometimes used as a cover for anti-Semitism or, in some cases, that it does not spring from similar impulses, whether on the part of the far Right or the far Left or elements in between. This was the blatant motive of the neo-Nazi National Front, a forerunner of the British National Party, when it latched on to the "anti-Zionist" crusade in the 1970s, using all the familiar anti-Semitic imagery and gobbledegook. A similar motive was quite transparent when the Polish Communist government launched a campaign against so-called Zionists in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that robbed many of the comparatively few remaining Polish Jews of their livelihood and party membership and coerced thousands of them into leaving the country, to settle—not in Israel in most cases—but in Scandinavia!
Nor is it to say that it is not absurd to see a clutch of despotic human rights abusers sitting in sanctimonious judgment of a nation that, despite its own serial transgressions, is not in their league. One only has to leaf through the range of reports produced by such illustrious organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to gain an idea of the scale of the tyranny elsewhere.
And it is certainly not to say that we should not be concerned about the propensity of some anti-Zionist jargon to propagate, wittingly or inadvertently, many of the familiar, sinister anti-Semitic tropes, such as Jewish power, Jewish money, Jewish control of the media and governments, Jewish vengeance, or even the idea of Jews as child-murderers.
Now that Jews Are in Power in One Country ...
While all this is deeply troubling, the concern should not cause us to lose a sense of proportion: the "objective" situation of the shtetl Jew in Mittel Europe in past centuries—when anti-Semitism was often official state policy and authentic blood libels were common currency—and the "objective" situation of the modern-day state of Israel, bear no resemblance to one another. In this respect, Zionism has succeeded in spades. But many Zionism-adherents seem not to have noticed.
The Jewish reality has changed dramatically since the end of World War II, with the establishment of a Jewish state and the entrenchment of equal citizenship rights in most if not all countries that Jews inhabit. Whichever way you look at it, there simply is no comparison in reality between past trumped-up accusations of abusive power leveled against a downtrodden, defenseless community that time and again was made to pay a heavy price for these baseless smears, and the current accusations of improper use of power against an advanced, nuclear-armed state which, for the past forty-two years, has enforced a harsh military rule over the lives of another downtrodden, dispossessed people, while relentlessly colonizing their remaining land.
Drawing parallels is treacherous territory, and I normally keep off it. But if there is any sort of parallel with the Mittel Europe of centuries past, the more compelling one is not between the subjugated Jew of then and the powerful, occupying state of Israel today but between the Jew of then and the occupied Palestinian of now. This is the parallel that much of international public opinion instinctively perceives, and it goes a long way to explaining the global switch of sympathy. To the extent that the Jewish world remains in denial, it is dislocating itself from the rest of the world.
And, whether we like it or not, and whatever our personal views may be, as Jews we are all implicated in Israel's actions, good or bad. While the audacious claims of successive Israeli governments to speak on behalf of Jews the world over may highlight the association—Prime Minister Olmert, for example, opined that Israel's ferocious war with Lebanon in 2006 was "a war that is fought by all the Jews"—the general perception is rife even without the explicit claim.
Herein, I believe, lies the key to the conspicuous increase in anti-Jewish sentiment in a range of countries, most strikingly among Arabs and Muslims. What has triggered it is no more of a mystery than what lies behind the simultaneous upsurge in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab feeling among Jews. It's the conflict, stupid. More particularly, it's the Occupation. And at the core of the Occupation is the invasive settlement project and the whole hideous infrastructure—segregational and intensely oppressive—that has proliferated on its back.
What If the Jewish State Had Been a Hindu or Buddhist State?
Shorn of the hysteria, and with exceptions, a lot of the opposition to Israel's actions has little or nothing to do with it being a Jewish state. Had it been a Hindu or a Buddhist state, for example, the Palestinians would have been no less embittered if the state in question had dispossessed them and then proceeded to dispossess them further. And it would still have attracted the opprobrium of people around the world, plenty of Jews included, who held a commitment to basic justice and fairness and the right to self-determination—the very attributes that, at an earlier point in time, underpinned widespread sympathy for a Jewish state.
Moreover, if Hindu or Buddhist diaspora communities ostentatiously demonstrated from far-away lands their solidarity with a militarily powerful, modern Hindu or Buddhist state which, albeit under horrendous provocation, eschewed the diplomatic path and mercilessly pounded—to international revulsion—an impoverished, entrapped people, from land, sea and air, causing widespread death and destruction, it would hardly be surprising if such communities found themselves on the receiving end of rising negative sentiment in the countries they inhabited.
The Hindu/Buddhist diaspora communities themselves—parading ostensibly under a banner of wanting peace for everyone—would doubtless see it all very differently and express their indignation at the very idea that they were condoning human rights abuses or that they were in denial about them. Accordingly, any manifestations of hostility toward them could only be explained in terms of inveterate anti-Hinduism or deep-seated anti-Buddhism. But such cognitive dissonance would not be to their benefit. On the contrary, its most likely consequence over time would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, deepening the antagonism toward them. This is where the real danger lies.
A Malfunctioning Moral Compass
Deepening antagonism from global onlookers is not the only danger. The diaspora associated with the occupying state may also be in danger of losing its moral direction. There may be some individuals who know that the latest military assault is merely the most recent in a rolling sequence of onslaughts that have pounded towns and villages in neighboring countries and in the occupied territories in preceding years, but who find themselves barely batting an eyelid at the widespread devastation. They have become inured to it. Some may go further still and celebrate the carnage, taking leave of their moral compass altogether. One of the problems with occupation regimes is that, irrespective of their national identity or religious or other affiliation, they tend to brutalize the occupier as well as the occupied.
The processes at work are not hard to fathom. If there is one cast-iron law of history, it is probably that occupations and other forms of colonial rule are sooner or later resisted, and when that point comes, the occupier has a straightforward choice between leaving and allowing the native population to exercise its independence and self-determination—or staying. When the time came, Israel made the disastrous decision to stay. The rest was predictable.
As the Palestinians stepped up their resistance, Israel stepped up its colonization of their territory and the harshness of its retaliation—if only to keep order. The charge of "brutal occupier," while plainly unjustified in the earlier years, turned out to be prophetic. In consequence, the moral appeal of Israel's case started to weaken, alongside the fading memory of the Nazi Holocaust. While the country's level of international support began to drain away, it simultaneously firmed up in the organized Jewish diaspora, through a form of heightened tribal solidarity. The sharpening polarization increasingly isolated Jewish opinion and led to a steady upsurge in anti-Jewish feeling.
I say all this was predictable because, in essence—although in the future conditional tense—I first mapped out this very sequence in a Fabian pamphlet in the mid-1970s, a relatively calm period in the Palestinian territories. But it wasn't intended as a prediction, as I felt sure that Israel, in its own self-interest, would have the good sense to leave the occupied territories in the near future and help foster a Palestinian state. It was more of a hypothetical warning of what might happen in the decades ahead in the unlikely event that Israel failed to come to terms with the imperative of withdrawal. Unfortunately, Israel lost its way and the scenario I described thirty-five years ago has since played itself out.
At the time of my writing, there were fewer than 5,000 settlers in the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Today, there are around 500,000. Israel appears more entrenched in the West Bank—the principal focus of Palestinian national aspirations—than ever, and organized Jewish diaspora opinion behind Israel and its policies seems more solid than ever. As the Palestinians despair of a two-state solution—and as Israelis despair, too, but for somewhat different reasons—the prospects of a fair and workable peace settlement are fast fading. In the absence of a plausible alternative, the conflict is on the verge of becoming unresolvable and of transforming itself into a state of perpetual strife, with potentially dire international consequences, not least, I fear, for Jews around the world.
The downward trajectory of the situation has been brought into focus recently by the Goldstone Report on the war in Gaza and by Israel's usual "there's-nothing-to-it" response to that report. More ominously, it has been sharpened by the growing worldwide BDS campaign—a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel—which, despite the occasional Pyrrhic "pro-Israel victory" that every time seems to excite the U.K.'s Jewish Chronicle and other Jewish media to no end, we can be sure will continue to gather steam for as long as the Occupation lasts. How big a step is it from boycotting Israeli goods to boycotting shops that stock such goods? And guess which shops this will mostly affect? The battle lines are already being sketched out.
The Mantras of Self-Justification ... and Self-Delusion
How, one may ask, does a reputedly intelligent people, with traditionally strong humanistic values, manage constantly to delude itself about what is going on, what lies in store and what needs to be done? And how has it allowed the Jewish Star of David, and by implication the Jewish religion and Jewish people, to become associated in the eyes of growing numbers of people with repression?
One answer is that, over the years, a blanket of self-justifying stories and catchphrases that we tell ourselves and everyone else time and again, ad nauseam, has smothered the art of rational thought. Many of the mantras will be familiar:
"We are the only democracy in the Middle East. We have the most moral army in the world. The Palestinians spurned our generous offer—as always, with violence. We have the right to defend ourselves. There is no peace partner. The Arabs have always rejected us and always will. Palestinian terrorism. Arab terrorism. Muslim terrorism. Anti-Semitism. New anti-Semitism. Blood libels. Self-hating Jews. Islamo-fascism. Security, security, security. Everyone else is naïve, naïve, naïve. We have no alternative." And the list goes on. It is worth noting, however, that one formerly popular slogan, "the most liberal occupation of all time," is rarely heard these days.
Again, it's not that there is nothing to any of these catchphrases or the stories that underpin them—although many of them do not stand up well to scrutiny—but they are constantly wheeled out, in a spirit of injured innocence, to deflect any substantive criticism of Israeli actions.
The analogy with the hypothetical Hindu and Buddhist states can be taken only so far. It breaks down once an explanation for the ostensibly wicked ways of the "nation of usurpers and occupiers" is sought by delving into their scriptures, belief systems, history, or supposed genetic makeup. In the Jewish case, this does not require much original or detailed research for, possibly uniquely, there, waiting in the wings, is a pernicious time-tested ideology—that of full-blown anti-Semitism—with all the answers, simplistic and absurd though they may be. It is at this point that anti-Jewish sentiment tips portentously into something far more sinister. Hinduism and Buddhism, whatever their own issues, have nothing to compare with this.
I make none of the above observations with relish. There was a time in my life when I sang from the regulation Jewish pro-Zionist song sheet and defended Israel's corner at the local, national, and international student levels, first as an active member of the Jewish Society at the University of Birmingham, then, more diplomatically—and I believe fairly—as student union president during the seminal 1967 Arab-Israeli war that spilled over onto campuses up and down the country, and later as deputy president of the British National Union of Students, responsible for international affairs during a distinctly hot phase of the cold war, in which the Middle East conflict played a starring role. I believed then, as I do now, in the essential justice of Israel's underlying cause and backed its right to self-determination and independence, free of threat—not always to my political or personal advantage. The Jews had suffered enough over many generations and deserved their own place, if that's what many of them wanted.
I was struck, as others have been, by Lord Byron's lament in 1815, when the worst tragedies to face the Jewish people still lay a distance ahead and several decades before Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was a twinkle in anyone's eye. Byron wrote: "The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cave, / Mankind their country, Israel but the grave!" By "Israel," of course, he meant the Jewish people.
But, in the attempt, more than a century later, to rectify the Jewish calamity, a second people paid a heavy price. The ill-fated Palestinians—the knock-on victims of Nazi atrocities, whose original felony was simply to be in the way of another distressed people's frantic survival stratagem—have also suffered enough and are no less worthy of their place in the sun. If they don't get it soon, the Israelis, for sure, will never be left in peace to enjoy theirs. In this respect, each holds the key to the other's destiny.
The passionate arguments deployed in bygone days—that Israel was not expansionist, that it desperately yearned for peace, that it was eager to withdraw from the occupied territories, that it would guarantee everyone access to their religious sites, that it was a good friend of the Palestinians, that it did everything it possibly could to avoid civilian casualties, and so on—have all been exposed, one by one.
It's not that these arguments were necessarily false from the very beginning. But little by little they were usurped by the triumphalist mood that infiltrated the country and swept the Jewish world following the Six-Day War and the hubris the resounding victory gave rise to. Such characteristics are of course not unique to Israel. They are common to conquering powers and have frequently led to their eventual downfall.
The Immutable Terms of Any Deal
So what may be done?
By far the preferable—and simplest—path would be a public declaration of a swift, authentic change of Israeli policy that heralded a genuine commitment to ending the Occupation, pulling out of the West Bank, sharing Jerusalem, ending the siege of Gaza, and living peacefully and in mutual respect alongside a sovereign Palestinian state broadly along the pre-June 1967 borders, albeit with agreed, equitable land exchanges. Nothing less than this will ever do, no matter which Palestinians are on the other side of the bargaining table or which government is in power in Israel or indeed the United States. These are the immutable terms of any deal, and Israeli leaders' occasional and hollow claims to be extending a hand in peace to the Arab world are no substitute. Absent the above commitments, they are worthless platitudes.
An Israeli declaration along the lines I have outlined, if sincere, could radically transform the regional and international political atmosphere, just as the Oslo Accords did in the 1990s. Almost overnight, Israel moved from semi-pariah to semi-hero. Its leaders, together with the Palestinian leader, were awarded the Nobel peace prize. Shimon Peres, then the Israeli foreign minister, was spoken of as a possible future UN Secretary General. One country after another, including from the Arab and Muslim worlds, lined up to establish or re-establish relations with and visit the Jewish state. As the optimism, in subsequent years, gave way to gloom and doom, it is easy to forget the uplifting mood of that time.
Today, sixteen disappointing years later, the reaction to a fresh initiative may not be quite so dramatic, but a firm Israeli commitment along the lines described would give the Palestinians—as well as the Israelis—something tangible to hope for. It could be the vital trigger everyone is waiting for to spark off a fresh momentum.
If they had any sense, Jewish diaspora communities would use such influence as they have with the Israeli government to encourage it to adopt such a policy and simultaneously align themselves with apposite international moves to this end—if not from conviction then at least on the grounds of prudent self-protection.
And Failing That ... Jews Must Protest
In the more likely, if regrettable, event that the current Israeli government will commit itself to no such thing, what should Jewish diaspora communities do? I believe they would be well advised to take a deep breath and reconsider their habitual reflexive responses, which are in part responsible for the mess we are in. No one would expect them to waver from their uncompromising support for the genuine welfare of the Israeli state and people, and I do not propose this. But, with precisely this welfare in mind, it is beyond time for them to distance themselves from the expansionist policies of the Israeli government, its belligerent approach to problem-solving in the region, and its propensity to infringe Palestinian human rights, periodically on a massive scale.
Some Jewish groups and many individual Jews are already doing this, to the consternation of certain voluble self-appointed guardians of the Jewish good. However, in the main, these dissenting Jews are, I believe, helping to lower the temperature of anti-Jewish feeling.
To state the obvious, not everyone will agree with all the arguments expounded here. That is their prerogative. But this is not a purely academic discussion. The price of getting it wrong could be high. To those who hold that Israel is not "in occupation" of the West Bank at all, but that it has "liberated" the biblical Judea and Samaria, more worldly considerations may matter little. This is a voice that has grown louder over the years, and it is not susceptible to reasoned argument. Nor does it concern itself, in a serious way, with such secular anxieties as anti-Semitism.
But there is another camp that is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism. Indeed, it is convinced that anti-Semitism is the principal underlying cause of the conflict, and—with the full force of the self-fulfilling prophecy behind it—interprets any manifestation of ill feeling toward Jews, or even toward Israel, as compelling proof of this conviction. It is "Jew-hatred," they say, that continues to keep the conflict going and prevents Israel from leaving the West Bank. Movement toward a peace settlement will be possible only once the Arab and Muslim worlds, they argue, have purged their anti-Semitism—doubtless a worthy goal but one with an almost limitlessly extendable bar and a certain cart-before-the-horse quality to it.
In the end, this argument is both an excuse and a recipe for sustaining the status quo, continuing the colonization of the West Bank, the building of exclusive roads, the construction of the monstrous separation barrier, the destruction or confiscation of Palestinian homes, and, in general, the encroachment on and encirclement of the remaining space of the putative Palestinian state.
Through cheap and inappropriate usage, the charge of anti-Semitism has become so debased—in particular when it is directed at the dispossessed Palestinians themselves and at others for whom universal justice and human rights are genuinely paramount—that a strange and dreadful thing is starting to happen: the charge of anti-Semitism is gradually being transformed in the minds of many from a mark of shame to a badge of honor. This is quite an achievement.
But not everything is so bleak. In the White House, there is a president who is learning his trade but who seems to have the right instincts. Intellectually, emotionally, and politically, he is committed to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the near future on the only basis that, for the last forty years at least, makes any sense: two states for two peoples. The twenty-seven-nation European Union, to Israel's predictable ire, has recently reiterated the same policy in very clear terms, laying emphasis on the need for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of both states.
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which calls for full peace and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967—an offer that would have had Israelis dancing in the street not so long ago—remains on the table, with the support of the twenty-two-nation Arab League and the endorsement of the fifty-six-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a speech in June 2009, uttered, for Likud, the hitherto forbidden phrase "a Palestinian state," even if he hedged it with strict preconditions. The PLO, too, still remains committed to the two-state policy it adopted in 1988, and even Hamas has indicated its preparedness to do a deal based on the pre-June 1967 borders.
So, it seems, many of the pieces are in place. But they are no more than the bare bones of a comprehensive solution and will amount to little without a deft international strategy that responds to the urgent needs of the moment, coupled with an effective enforcement mechanism. Sponsoring indirect or even direct negotiations between inherently unequal parties in the first instance is decidedly not that strategy. What is required now is an end to sham processes and a shift of focus directly to the endgame.
We are on the cusp. It could go this way or that. Hard decisions will have to be made. In the next year or so, we'll all have a better idea of where we stand and what to look forward to. Much will depend on President Obama's grit and strategic sense. One thing's for certain, though. Whatever happens, there will be profound repercussions, good or bad, for Jews qua Jews around the world. So if we can have any influence on the decisions, let's try to make sure they are rational, sound, and responsible, for much rides on them—not just for Israel and the Palestinians, but for all of us.
Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?
On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.
Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I attended an Afghanistan briefing for Anne Patterson on Dec. 1, 2005, soon after she became assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs, she turned to me with her characteristic smile and said, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” We had just learned that in the two previous months Afghan farmers had planted almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of 165,000 hectares (637 square miles). The 2006 harvest would be the biggest narco-crop in history. That was the challenge we faced. Patterson — already a three-time ambassador — made me her deputy at the law-enforcement bureau, which has anti-crime programs in dozens of countries.
At the beginning of 2006, I went to the high-profile London Conference on Afghanistan. It was a grand event mired in deception, at least with respect to the drug situation. Everyone from the Afghan delegation and most in the international community knew that poppy cultivation and heroin production would increase significantly in 2006. But the delegates to the London Conference instead dwelled on the 2005 harvest, which was lower than that of 2004, principally because of poor weather and market manipulation by drug lords like Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, who had been governor of the heroin capital of the world — Helmand Province — and then a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament. So the Afghans congratulated themselves on their tremendous success in fighting drugs even as everyone knew the problem was worse than ever.
About three months later, after meeting with local officials in Helmand — my helicopter touched down in the middle of a poppy field — I went to the White House to brief Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others on the expanding opium problem. I advocated a policy replicating what had worked in other countries: public education about the evils of heroin and the illegality of cultivating poppies; alternative crops; eradication of poppy fields; interdiction of drug shipments and arrest of traffickers; and improvements to the judicial system.
I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication, although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash. The chemical used, glyphosate, was a weed killer used all over the United States, Europe and even Afghanistan. (Drug lords use it in their gardens in Kabul.) There were volumes of evidence demonstrating that it was harmless to humans and became inert when it hit the ground. My assistant at the time was a Georgia farmer, and he told me that his father mixed glyphosate with his hands before applying it to their orchards.
Nonetheless, Karzai opposed it, and we at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs went along. We financed ground-based eradication instead: police using tractors and weed-whackers to destroy the fields of farmers who refused to plant alternative crops. Ground-based eradication was inefficient, costly, dangerous and more subject to corrupt dealings among local officials than aerial eradication. But it was our only option.
Yet I continued to press for aerial eradication and a greater commitment to providing security for eradicators. Rumsfeld was already in political trouble, so when he started to resist my points, Rice quickly and easily shut him down. The briefing at the White House was well received by Rice and the others present. White House staff members also made clear to me that Bush continued to be “a big fan of aerial eradication.”
The vice president made only one comment: “You got a tough job.”
Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission. A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia, she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but the Pentagon strategy was “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business.
The Drug Enforcement Administration worked the heroin trafficking and interdiction effort with the Afghans. They targeted kingpins and disrupted drug-smuggling networks. The D.E.A. had excellent agents in Afghanistan, but there were not enough of them, and they had seemingly unending difficulties getting Mi-17 helicopters and other equipment that the Pentagon promised for the training of the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan. In addition, the Pentagon had reneged on a deal to allow the D.E.A. the use of precious ramp space at the Kabul airport. Consequently, the effort to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers had stalled. Less than 1 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan was being seized there. The effort became even more complicated later in 2006, when Benjamin Freakley, the two-star U.S. general who ran the eastern front, shut down all operations by the D.E.A. and Afghan counternarcotics police in Nangarhar — a key heroin-trafficking province. The general said that antidrug operations were an unnecessary obstacle to his military operations.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAid) was also under fire — particularly from Congress — for not providing better alternative crops for farmers. USAid had distributed seed and fertilizer to most of Afghanistan, but more comprehensive agricultural programs were slow to start in parts of the country. The USAid officers in Kabul were competent and committed, but they had already lost several workers to insurgent attacks, and were understandably reluctant to go into Taliban territory to implement their programs.
The Department of Justice had just completed an effort to open the Afghan anti-narcotics court, so capacity to prosecute was initially low. Justice in Afghanistan was administered unevenly by tribes, religious leaders and poorly paid, highly corruptible judges. In the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked out the back door. We received dozens of reports to this effect.
And then there was the problem of the Afghan National Police. The Pentagon frequently proclaimed that the Afghan National Army (which the Pentagon trained) was performing wonderfully, but that the police (trained mainly by the Germans and the State Department) were not. A respected American general in Afghanistan, however, confided to me that the army was not doing well, either; that the original plan for training the army was flimsy and underfinanced; and that, consequently, they were using police to fill holes in the army mission. Thrust into a military role, unprepared police lost their lives trying to hold territory in dangerous areas.
There was no coherent strategy to resolve these issues among the U.S. agencies and the Afghan government. When I asked career officers at the State Department for the interagency strategy for Afghan counternarcotics, they produced the same charts I used to brief the cabinet in Washington months before. “There is no written strategy,” they confessed.
As big as these challenges were, there were even bigger ones. A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July 16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his candidacy for president. Karzai’s office said Sabit’s candidacy violated laws against political activity by officials. Sabit told a press conference that Karzai “has never been able to tolerate rivals.”)
A nearly equal challenge in 2006 was the lack of resolve in the international community. Although Britain’s foreign office strongly backed antinarcotics efforts (with the exception of aerial eradication), the British military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military. British forces — centered in Helmand — actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort. I had to fly to Brussels and show one of these leaflets to the supreme allied commander in Europe, who oversees Afghan operations for NATO, to have this counterproductive information campaign stopped. It was a small victory; the truth was that many of our allies in the International Security Assistance Force were lukewarm on antidrug operations, and most were openly hostile to aerial eradication.
Nonetheless, throughout 2006 and into 2007 there were positive developments (although the Pentagon did not supply the helicopters to the D.E.A. until early 2008). The D.E.A. was training special Afghan narcotics units, while the Pentagon began to train Afghan pilots for drug operations. We put together educational teams that convened effective antidrug meetings in the more stable northern provinces. We used manual eradication to eliminate about 10 percent of the crop. In some provinces with little insurgent activity, the eradication numbers reached the 20 percent threshold — a level that drug experts see as a tipping point in eradication — and poppy cultivation all but disappeared in those areas by 2007. And the Department of Justice got the counternarcotics tribunal to process hundreds of midlevel cases.
By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.
In late January 2007, there was an urgent U.S. cabinet meeting to discuss the situation. The attendees agreed that the deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and John Walters, the drug czar, would oversee the development of the first interagency counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan. They asked me to coordinate the effort, and, after Patterson’s intervention, I was promoted to ambassadorial rank. We began the effort with a briefing for Negroponte, Walters, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and several senior Pentagon officials. We displayed a map showing how poppy cultivation was becoming limited to the south, more associated with the insurgency and disassociated from poverty. The Pentagon chafed at the briefing because it reflected a new reality: narcotics were becoming less a problem of humanitarian assistance and more a problem of insurgency and war.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime was arriving at the same conclusion. Later that year, they issued a report linking the drug trade to the insurgency and made a controversial statement: “Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no longer associated with poverty — quite the opposite.” The office convincingly demonstrated that poor farmers were abandoning the crop and that poppy growth was largely confined to some of the wealthiest parts of Afghanistan. The report recommended that eradication efforts be pursued “more honestly and more vigorously,” along with stronger anticorruption measures. Earlier this year, the U.N. published an even more detailed paper titled “Is Poverty Driving the Afghan Opium Boom?” It rejected the idea that farmers would starve without the poppy, concluding that “poverty does not appear to have been the main driving factor in the expansion of opium poppy cultivation in recent years.”
The U.N. reports shattered the myth that poppies are grown by destitute farmers who have no other source of income. They demonstrated that approximately 80 percent of the land under poppy cultivation in the south had been planted with it only in the last two years. It was not a matter of “tradition,” and these farmers did not need an alternative livelihood. They had abandoned their previous livelihoods — mainly vegetables, cotton and wheat (which was in severely short supply) — to take advantage of the security vacuum to grow a more profitable crop: opium.
Around the same time, the United States released photos of industrial-size poppy farms — many owned by pro-government opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers. Most of these narco-farms were near major southern cities. Farmers were digging wells, surveying new land for poppy cultivation, diverting U.S.-built irrigation canals to poppy fields and starting expensive reclamation projects.
Yet Afghan officials continued to say that poppy cultivation was the only choice for its poor farmers. My first indication of the insincerity of this position came at a lunch in Brussels in September 2006 attended by Habibullah Qaderi, who was then Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics. He gave a speech in which he said that poor Afghan farmers have no choice but to grow poppies, and asked for more money. A top European diplomat challenged him, holding up a U.N. map showing the recent trend: poppy growth decreasing in the poorest areas and growing in the wealthier areas. The minister, taken aback, simply reiterated his earlier point that Afghanistan needed more money for its destitute farmers. After the lunch, however, Qaderi approached me and whispered: “I know what you say is right. Poverty is not the main reason people are growing poppy. But this is what the president of Afghanistan tells me to tell others.”
In July 2007, I briefed President Karzai on the drive for a new strategy. He was interested in the new incentives that we were developing, but became sullen and unresponsive when I discussed the need to balance those incentives with new disincentives — including arrests of high-level traffickers and eradication of poppy fields in the wealthier areas of the Pashtun south, where Karzai had his roots and power base.
We also tried to let the public know about the changing dynamics of the trade. Unfortunately, most media outlets clung to the myth that the problem was out of control all over the country, that only desperate farmers grew poppies and that any serious law-enforcement effort would drive them into the hands of the Taliban. The “starving farmer” was a convenient myth. It allowed some European governments to avoid involvement with the antidrug effort. Many of these countries had only one- or two-year legislative mandates to be in Afghanistan, so they wanted to avoid any uptick in violence that would most likely result from an aggressive strategy, even if the strategy would result in long-term success. The myth gave military officers a reason to stay out of the drug war, while prominent Democrats used the myth to attack Bush administration policies. And the Taliban loved it because their propaganda campaign consisted of trotting out farmers whose fields had been eradicated and having them say that they were going to starve.
An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban were preventing the implementation of an effective counterdrug program. And the rest of us could not turn them around.
Nonetheless, we stayed hopeful as we worked on what became the U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan. The Defense Department was initially cooperative (as I testified to Congress). We agreed to expand the local meetings and education campaign that worked well in the north. Afghan religious leaders would issue anti-poppy statements, focusing on the anti-Islamic nature of drugs and the increasing addiction rate in Afghanistan. In the area of agricultural incentives, since most farmers already had an alternative crop, we agreed to improve access to markets not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and the wider region. USAid would establish more cold-storage facilities, build roads and establish buying cooperatives that could guarantee prices for legal crops. With the British, we developed an initiative to reward provinces that became poppy-free or reduced their poppy crop by a specified amount. Governors who performed well would get development projects: schools, bridges and hospitals.
But there had to be disincentives too. We agreed to provide security for manual poppy eradication, so that we could show the Afghan people that the more-powerful farmers were vulnerable. We focused on achieving better ground-based eradication, but reintroduced the possibility of aerial eradication. We agreed to increase D.E.A. training of counternarcotics police and establish special investigative units to gather physical and documentary evidence against corrupt Afghan officials. And we developed policies that would increase the Afghan capacity to prosecute traffickers.
Adding to the wave of optimism was the arrival of William Wood as the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He had been ambassador in Colombia, so he understood drugs and insurgency well. His view was that poppy cultivation was illegal in Afghanistan, so he didn’t really care whether the farmers were poor or rich. “We have a lot of poor people in the drug trade in the U.S.A. — people mixing meth in their trailers in rural areas and people selling crack in the inner cities — and we put them in jail,” he said.
At first Wood advocated — in an unclassified e-mail message, surprisingly — a massive aerial-eradication program that would wipe out 80,000 hectares of poppies in Helmand Province, delivering a fatal blow to the root of the narcotics problem. “If there is no poppy, there is nothing to traffic,” Wood said. The plan looked good on paper, but we knew it would be impossible to sell to Karzai and the Pentagon. Wood eventually agreed to language advocating, at a minimum, force-protected ground-based eradication with the possibility of limited aerial eradication.
Another ally for a more aggressive approach to the problem was David Kilcullen, a blunt counterterrorism expert. He became increasingly concerned about the drug money flowing to the Taliban. He noted that, while Afghans often shift alliances, what remains constant is their respect for strength and consistency. He recommended mobile courts that had the authority to execute drug kingpins in their own provinces. (You could have heard a pin drop when he first made that suggestion at a large meeting of diplomats.) In support of aerial eradication, Kilcullen pointed out that, with manual eradication you have to “fight your way in and fight your way out” of the poppy fields, making it deadly, inefficient and subject to corrupt bargaining. Aerial eradication, by contrast, is quick, fair and efficient. “If we are already bombing Taliban positions, why won’t we spray their fields with a harmless herbicide and cut off their money?” Kilcullen asked.
So it appeared that things were moving nicely. We were going to increase incentives to farmers and politicians while also increasing the disincentives with aggressive eradication and arrest of criminal officials and leading traffickers. The Pentagon seemed on board.
Then it all began to unravel.
In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council, in order to ensure the strategy paper would be executed, decided to take it to the Deputies Committee — a group of cabinet deputy secretaries led by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, whom President Bush had appointed his “war czar” — which had the power to make the document official U.S. policy. Harriman asked me to start developing an unclassified version for public release.
Almost immediately, the Pentagon bureaucracy — particularly the South Asia office — made an about-face. First, they resisted bringing the paper to the deputies. When that effort failed (largely because of unexpected support for the plan from new field commanders like Gen. Dan McNeill, who saw the narcotics-insurgency nexus and were willing to buck their Pentagon minders), the Pentagon bureaucrats tried to prevent the release of an unclassified version to the public. Indeed, two senior Pentagon officials threatened me with professional retaliation if we made the unclassified document public. When we went ahead anyway, the Pentagon leaked the contents of the classified version to Peter Gilchrist, a British general posted in Washington. Defense Department officials were thus enlisting a foreign government to help kill U.S. policy — a policy that implicitly recognized that the Pentagon’s “sequencing” approach had failed and that the Defense Department would have to get more involved in fighting the narcotics trade.
Gilchrist told me that the plan was unacceptable to Britain. Britain, apparently joined by Sweden (which has fewer than 500 troops in a part of the country where there is no poppy cultivation), sent letters to Karzai urging him to reject key elements of the U.S. plan. By the time Wood and Secretary Rice pressed Karzai for more aggressive action, Karzai told Rice that because some people in the U.S. government did not support the plan, and some allies did not support it, he was not going to support it, either. An operations-center assistant, who summarized the call for me over my car phone just after it occurred, made an uncharacteristic editorial comment: “It was not a good call, ambassador.”
Even more startling, it appeared that top Pentagon officials knew nothing about the changing nature of the drug problem or about the new plan. When, through a back channel, I briefed the under secretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, on the relationship between drugs and the insurgency, he said he had “never heard any of this.” Worse still, Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to Congress in December 2007 that we did not have a strategy for fighting drugs in Afghanistan. I received a quick apology from the Pentagon counterdrugs unit, which sent a memo to Gates informing him that we actually did have a strategy.
This dissension was, I believe, music to Karzai’s ears. When he convened all 34 Afghan provincial governors in Kabul in September 2007 (I was a “guest of honor”), he made antidrug statements at the beginning of his speech, but then lashed out at the international community for wanting to spray his people’s crops and giving him conflicting advice. He got a wild ovation. Not surprising — since so many in the room were closely tied to the narcotics trade. Sure, Karzai had Taliban enemies who profited from drugs, but he had even more supporters who did.
Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.
This is not just speculation, even when you stick with unclassified materials. In September 2007, The Kabul Weekly, an independent newspaper, ran a blunt editorial laying out the issue: “It is obvious that the Afghan government is more than kind to poppy growers. . . . [It] opposes the American proposal for political reasons. The administration believes that it will lose popularity in the southern provinces where the majority of opium is cultivated. They’re afraid of losing votes. More than 95 percent of the residents of . . . the poppy growing provinces — voted for President Karzai.” The editorial recommended aerial eradication. That same week, the first vice president of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, wrote a scathing op-ed article in The Sunday Telegraph in London: “Millions of pounds have been committed in provinces including Helmand Province for irrigation projects and road building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport opium. . . . Deep-rooted corruption . . . exists in our state institutions.” The Afghan vice president concluded, “We must switch from ground-based eradication to aerial spraying.”
But Karzai did not care. Back in January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade. (Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, said Karzai has “taken the step of issuing a decree asking the government to be vigilant of any business dealing involving his family, and requesting that any suspicions be fully investigated.”) Some governors of Helmand and other provinces — Pashtuns who had advocated aerial eradication — changed their positions after the “palace” spoke to them. Karzai was lining up his Pashtun allies for re-election, and the drug war was going to have to wait. “Maybe we taught him too much about politics,” Rice said to me after I briefed her on these developments.
Karzai then put General Khodaidad (who, like many Afghans, goes by only one name) in charge of the Afghan counternarcotics efforts. Khodaidad — a conscientious man, competent and apparently not corrupt — was a Hazara. The Hazaras had no influence over the southern Pashtuns who were dominating the drug trade. While Khodaidad did well in the north, he got nowhere in Helmand and Kandahar — and told me so. Karzai had to have known this would be the case.
But the real test for the Afghan government and the Pentagon came with the “force protection” issue. At high-level international conferences, the Afghans — finally, under European pressure — agreed to eradicate 50,000 hectares (more than 25 percent of the crop) in the first months of this year; and they agreed that the Afghan National Army would provide force protection.
The plan was simple. The Afghan Poppy Eradication Force would go to Helmand Province with two battalions of the national army and eradicate the fields of the wealthier farmers — including fields owned by local officials. Protecting the eradication force would also enable the arrest of key traffickers. The U.S. military, which trained the Afghan army, would assist in moving the soldiers there and provide outer-perimeter security. The U.S. military would not participate directly in eradication or arrest operations; it would only enable them.
But once again, Karzai and his Pentagon friends thwarted the plan. First, Anthony Harriman was replaced at the National Security Council by a colonel who held the old-school Pentagon view that “we don’t do the drug thing.” He would not let me see General Lute or Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, when the force-protection plans failed to materialize. We asked numerous Pentagon officials to lobby the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, for immediate force protection, but they did little.
Consequently, in late March, the central eradication force set out for Helmand without the promised Afghan National Army. Almost immediately, they came under withering attack for several days — 107-millimeter rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, machine-gun fire and mortars. Three members of the Afghan force were killed and several were seriously wounded. They eradicated just over 1,000 hectares, about 1 percent of the Helmand crop, before withdrawing to Kabul.
This spring, more U.S. troops arrived in Afghanistan. They were effective, experienced warriors — many coming from Iraq — but they knew little about drugs. When they arrived in southern Afghanistan, they announced that they would not interfere with poppy harvesting in the area. “Not our job,” they said. Despite the wheat shortage and the threat of starvation, they gave interviews saying that the farmers had no choice but to grow poppies.
At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a “perverse incentive,” and it has never worked anywhere in the world. It was not going to work in eastern Afghanistan, either. Farmers were lining up to have their crops eradicated and get the money.
On May 12, at a press conference in Kabul, General Khodaidad declared the 2008 anti-poppy effort in southern Afghanistan to be a failure. Eradication this year would total less than a third of the 20,000 hectares that Afghanistan eradicated in 2007. The north and east — particularly Balkh, Badakhshan and Nangarhar provinces — continued to improve because of strong political will and better civilian-military cooperation. But the base of the Karzai government — Kandahar and Helmand — would have record crops, less eradication and fewer arrests than in years past. And the Taliban would get stronger.
Despite this development, the Afghans were busily putting together an optimistic assessment of their progress for the Paris Conference on Afghanistan — where, on June 12, world leaders, including Karzai, met in an event reminiscent of the London Conference of 2006. In Paris, the Afghan government raised more than $20 billion in additional development assistance. But the drug problem was a nuisance that could jeopardize the financing effort. So drugs were eliminated from the formal agenda and relegated to a 50-minute closed discussion at a lower-level meeting the week before the conference.
That is where we are today. The solution remains a simple one: execute the policy developed in 2007. It requires the following steps:
1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.
2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.
3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.
4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.
5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.
There are other initiatives that could help as well: better engagement of Afghanistan’s neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction programs. But if we — the Afghans and the U.S. — do just the five items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban.
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