Video – War on terror through Muslim eyes
Al Jazeera’s program, Empire, investigates the war on terror as perceived by some of those whose countries are targeted.
Edward Said: The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations – video lecture
Edward Said’s rebuttal of Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis that conflicts today will be ideological rather than social and economic.
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US raids and secret prisons in Afghanistan
Anand Gopal has written a horror filled investigative report on US secret prisons, house raids, and torture in Afghanistan. It is published in TomDispatch, and the Nation. Gopal’s research was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. The article is gruesome but a highly recommended read.
An interview with Anand Gopal is available at TomDispatch, here.
Excerpts from Obama’s Secret Prisons:
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogation.
In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.
…It was the 19th of November 2009, at 3:15 am. A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city, a town of ancient provenance in the country’s south. A team of U.S. soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of whom were sleeping in the family’s one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they — both children — refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.
…Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee.
…“We’ve called his phone, but it doesn’t answer,” says his cousin Qarar, the spokesman for the agriculture minister.
…“I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners,” he adds. “But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don’t care if I get fired for saying it, but that’s the truth.”
Afghanistan’s budget almost entirely financed by foreign countries
Afghanistan, Kabul market
Afghanistan’s national budget is 90% financed by foreign governments despite the fact that it has increased its share of income from tax and customs revenues by 50% over the past year.
The Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit has written the following on the Afghan economy:
Consistent with the current consensus on development held by the donor community and international financial institutions (IFIs), the privatisation process has gained increased momentum in Afghanistan. The government has committed to the privatisation agenda in its Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy (IANDS) and in the Afghanistan Compact agreed upon with the international community in January 2006. This followed the November 2005 approval by the Cabinet to amend the State-Owned Enterprise Law, allowing for the divestment of state enterprises by various means. Fifty four fully state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been slated for privatisation as going concerns or through liquidation by the end of 2009.
The report states that the total value of these sales is estimated to be US$614, which is small by international standards.
However, the total government budget of Afghanistan in 2008 was around US$685 million, so the sale of public assets amounts to a large share for a country whose assets and resources are very small. The government revenue estimate was provided by Afghanistan’s Minister of Finance, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, during an interview with foreign press.
With a national budget that is so small, many foreign infrastructure projects have only added to the problem because of their large price tags, which are more suitable to high priced markets in the developed world. Although, at the time of construction, the projects may be fully funded by foreign donors, the maintenance cost of the same infrastructure may be prohibitive, impracticle, or even impossible for the Afghan government to afford without taking loans.
Consider the Louis Berger Group’s contract to build 1,000 schools, each costing US$274,000. In this case, the Afghan government not only has to worry about maintaining the schools, they might not even be usable. In January 2009, Ann Jones, who for years worked in Afghanistan as an aid worker, says that Louis Berger, “already way behind schedule in 2005, had finished only a small fraction of them when roofs began to collapse under the snows of winter.”
Sustaining an Afghan government financially on foreign life support requires multiyear planning from all donors involved. This requires that Afghanistan’s needs be incorporated into the budgets of NATO countries, and that many of the political decisions on funding be made by foreign governments accountable to their own people. There is not much room for self-reliance in this scenario.
Urbanization in Africa: Achille Mbembe audio
Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe, a professor of history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand , briefly speaks to the discourse of urbanism in Africa, a continent which is facing a doubling of its urban population in only 15 years. There is a serious challenge, then, of urban transition, a process that is often too detached from political implications by reducing the process of urbanization to little more than a technical administrative dimension. What Mbembe suggests is that there is much more to urbanism than the management of cities, and that the exercise of voice is vital to collective social life.
He gave this 15 minute lecture at the Urban Age conference in Johannesburg (2006).
The role of stories in Indian culture
Below is a lecture given by professor S.N. Balagangadhara (aka Balu) on the role of stories in Indian culture. He mentions that, in those stories that are indigenous to India, their diverse and prolific nature makes them important in learning forms of socialization. They are ways of representing the world as well as models of how to go about the world. He proposes that this provides a map for emulation, that they provide sub-intentional learning or mimetic learning.
He also briefly touches on the internalization, both within and without India, of the European experience of India being forwarded as the story of India. He gave this lecture in 2009, in Estonia’s University of Tartu.
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Seeing the Unseen
Hamid Dabashi has an interesting article, In the Absence of the Face, that investigates the unseen or faceless presence of God in the Quran, as a collapse of the sign into the signifier.
He quotes the 6th/12th century Shaykh Abu al-Futuh al-Razi, who tried to explain why Joseph smashed the idols in his prison:
… Calling them [the idols] gods is not but a meaningless name. The reason is that the Name is not the Named. Because if the Name were the Named, then by virtue of calling them god they would be god and it would be proper to worship them, and they would have been god by attributes, and yet that is impossible….
Here is another excerpt from the article:
Alif. Lam. Mim. This is the Scripture whereof there is no doubt, a guidance
unto those who ward off (evil). Who believe in the Unseen, and establish
worship, and spend of that We have bestowed upon them; And who believe in
that which is revealed unto thee (Muhammad) and that which was revealed
before thee, and are certain of the Hereafter.– The Qur’an 2:1-4
The inaugural moment of the Qur’an, of Re-Citation, is alphabetical. Audible, inarticulate, visible, meaning-held-at-bay, alphabet: Alif. Lam. Mim mean nothing. Signatures, though, authoritative. Letters coagulating to no word. Pseudo-Signs announcing themselves. Signifiers signifying nothing beyond their visuality. Signifiers feigning the Sign. Alif. Lam. Mim are the optical illusions of Signs precisely at the moment when they are about to suppress the visible absence of the Sign and mutate that absence, and thus that in/ability, into the instrumentality of the Signifier, the Sacred, the alphabetical ordering of access to Truth Manifest. The Truth is about to be Manifest-ed right here where it cannot be Manifest and it must hide its in/ability to be Manifest. Signatures of the Unseen: Alif. Lam. Mim are neither Signs nor Signifiers. They are both Signs and Signifiers. In that disabling contradiction is the enabling configuration that makes the Sacred, the aggressive substitution of the suggested Signification for the suppressed Sign, of the meaning of the Name for the shape of the Face, of the Hermeneutics of postponement for the Semiotics of the present, of the Metaphysics of fear for the Aesthetic of pleasure, possible.
[...The] visible substitution of the invisible Sign by determinedly collapsing it into a pregnant Signifier.
Militias and dialogue in Afghanistan
Afghan villagers in the north of the country, around Kunduz, have been forming their own militias. They say this is required to protect them against Taliban attacks since the Afghan Army and international forces are not able to do so. This is a very busy week for me, so, unfortunately, I’m not able to go into detail into these reports.
Meanwhile, talks have taken place between the Afghan government and insurgents.
Militarization of space
Space junk
Space, specifically Earth’s orbit, is being increasingly militarized. Orbital technologies provide significant advantages in communications, surveillance, targeting, intelligence, coordination, and, with time, potentially weaponization. The US, as a part of its strategy of ‘full spectrum dominance’ has sought to take advantage of its lead in space by creating facts on the ground (perhaps a bad phrase in this case…) by establishing the norms of space conduct as well as creating a commanding position for itself in orbit before more national players seriously join the space race.
According to the Join Vision 2020 report, “The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information. Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This report was written for the US military.
The Defense Industry Daily has more on the militarization of space:
In January 2001, a commission headed by then US Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld warned about a possible “space Pearl Harbor” in which a potential enemy would launch a surprise attack against US-based military space assets, disabling them. These assets include communications satellites and the GPS system, which is crucial for precision attack missiles and a host of military systems.
“The US is more dependent on space than any other nation. Yet the threat to the US and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits,” the commission warned.
One of the systems that grew out of the commission’s report was the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) project, which is developing a constellation of satellites to provide the US military with space situational awareness using visible sensors. Recent developments for the project include a $30 million contract for Boeing to provide maintenance and operations services for the SBSS logistics infrastructure.
