Carlyle, Gabriel

Late in 2007, someone forwarded me an excoriating critique of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) - the largest of Britain’s Trotskyist groups, and the driving force behind the Stop the War Coalition. Noting that the party had “shrunk to a shadow of the size it was even a few years ago” and that “anyone who has raised the issue has been derided”, the piece – written by a long-term SWP member for the Party’s internal bulletin - concluded that “[u]nless we radically address the decline we’ve…

Confronted with evidence of wide-ranging fraud on his behalf in Afghanistan’s recent presidential election, Hamid Karzai told Le Figaro: “There was fraud in 2004, and there is today, and there will be tomorrow.”

He had a point. While Tony Blair praised the 2004 presidential elections as a “magnificent tribute … to the power of democracy”, the reality was very different.

Vote early, vote often

Then, as now, “Voters in many rural areas [were] told by warlords and…

On 10 December, the former minister Kim Howells, who was in charge of Afghanistan at the Foreign Office for over three years before he stepped down in October, spoke up in the House of Commons, and lambasted the war effort.

Howells accused Afghanistan of corruption at the “institutional, provincial and personal level”. There are “few signs that the chaotic hegemony of warlords, gangsters, presidential placemen, incompetent and under-resourced provincial governors and self-serving…

According to the Washington Post, “the incoming [Obama] administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like ‘surge’ of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years” but instead “expects that the new deployments… will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called ‘the central front on terror’” (13…

The much-heralded US withdrawal from Iraq is turning out to be nothing of the kind. The US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA - see PN 2504) – which commits the US to withdrawing its combat forces “from Iraqi cities, villages and localities… no later than June 30, 2009”, and to withdrawing all US forces “from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011” (article 24) – was ratified by the Iraqi Parliament on 27 November, and approved by Iraq’s presidential council on 4 December.…

The Israel-Palestine conflict is often presented in the British media as a highly controversial subject of near-labyrinthine complexity – with its “road maps”, “final status agreements”, and endless “peace processes”. The tacit implication is clear: unless you’ve spent ten years getting a PhD in Israel-Palestine studies, and can argue fluently about the minutiae of the Wye River Memorandum and the Yom Kippur war, don’t even dream of trying to form an independent opinion. In truth, as Norman…

At least 40 civilians were killed in an airstrike on a wedding party in Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar province in Afghanistan on 3 November. 40 is the official Afghan government estimate; local residents reported that 90 people had been killed or wounded.

“I counted 90 dead bodies,” said Abdul Rahim, 26, who said he was a survivor of the family that hosted the wedding party. “I saw them with my own eyes,” he said in a telephone interview from Kandahar Province.

Rahim told…

Building on plans and programmes set in motion by the outgoing Bush administration, president-elect Barack Obama intends to escalate the US war in Afghanistan, and to force Britain to sharply increase its troop strength there from 8,000 to 11,000 soldiers on the ground.

There are already plans to spend $100 million next year expanding Kandahar airport to house 26 Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft for a US army ODIN (“observe, detect, identify and…

While the majority of Afghans want a negotiated solution to the present conflict, the outgoing Bush administration seems to see negotiations only as a tactic to weaken the enemy. At the same time, the incoming Obama administration seems to be turning against the idea of holding next year’s Afghan presidential elections.

As pointed out in previous PNs, a September 2007 poll found 74% of people in Afghanistan favoured negotiations between the Kabul government and the Taliban, and 54…

In October, War on Want produced a major report on the involvement of major British banks in the arms trade.

It turns out that all the UK’s high street banks - apart from the Co-operative bank - fund the arms industry through direct investment in shares, participation in loan syndicates and the provision of banking services.

Barclays has the largest amount of shares in the global arms sector, with £7.3bn invested in total. Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland…

As of 17 November, the US has a paper commitment to completely withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011. In reality, such a withdrawal remains extremely unlikely.

On 17 November, the US ambassador to Iraq and Iraq’s foreign minister signed a Status of Forces agreement (SOFA) – not yet agreed by Iraq’s parliament – committing the US to withdrawing its combat forces “from Iraqi cities, villages and localities … no later than June 30, 2009”, and to withdrawing all US forces “from all…

James Burmeister, 23-year-old Iraq war resister, was freed from military prison on 28 October, over two months early. The soldier of colour was jailed for six months on 17 July after going AWOL to Canada for 10 months in protest against the war in Iraq.
James was serving in Baghdad when his vehicle was caught in an IED explosion and he was hit in the face with shrapnel. Suffering from the physical and emotional wounds resulting from his injury, and his experiences working with “bait…

Last year, an intelligent and committed activist confessed to me that they did not really understand what “capitalism” meant. More recently, another friend bemoaned to me the high level of coverage given over to the current financial crisis in the papers – not for lack of appreciation of the subject’s importance, but because most of the coverage was either unintelligible or uninformative.

Fortunately, help is now on hand for both of them. Well-structured, straightforwardly written,…

To mark his eightieth birthday The New Press have published a new selection of Noam Chomsky’s political and linguistic writings (The Essential Chomsky).

While some of the selections (which span almost five decades) would have to be included in any essential collection - the famous demolition of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, or his reflections on the 1967 march on the Pentagon, where he was arrested for civil disobedience – there are also some surprising omissions, eg. his brilliant…

On 13 October, at a meeting in London, Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein Shahristani, put eight oil and gas fields, representing about 40% of Iraq’s known oil reserves, up for grabs.

According to press reports, foreign oil companies were told they will be allowed to access up to 49% of each field; and, rather than receiving a flat fee for pumping the oil, they can bid for a share of the extra revenue they generate.

The oil ministry has reportedly said that contracts could run…