Interview with Iran’s envoy to the IAEA
Iran, on Monday, informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it would pursue improved enrichment of uranium at one of its nuclear plants producing medical isotopes.
“Today we handed over the letter,” Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told Press TV.
He said Iran has asked the UN nuclear agency to dispatch its inspectors to the country to oversee the process of the 20 percent enrichment work.
…Soltanieh said Iran will use its nuclear stockpile to enrich uranium to up to 20 percent to supply the Tehran research reactor which produces medical isotopes.
Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East, has written the following on his blog about the issue at hand:
The compromise Iran offered is that they would keep sending abroad a small portion of their low enriched uranium for another country to enrich to 19.75% for the medical reactor, on a rolling basis. Salehi is saying that Ahmadinejad’s announcement was meant primarily to force acceptance of this alternative. At the same time, on Saturday Ahmadinejad seemed to say that he would accept the deal offered by the US in October. US officials were understandably skeptical about this alleged softening of Tehran’s position, and Salehi on Monday seemed to suggest that Iran was making a push for the hard liners’ compromise.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke as though Iran’s announcement that it was going to try to make its own medical isotopes with low enriched uranium was tantamount to a weapons program. Gates said that if Iran did seem to be close to getting a nuclear warhead, it would provoke a nuclear arms race in the region. But it seems obvious that it is Israel’s stockpile of some 200 nuclear weapons that is driving the already-existing nuclear arms race in the region.
The US will probably seek further sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council, this time on its banking sector. But there is a substantial possibility that China may protect Iran by vetoing any such new program of sanctions.
The following is Press TV’s exclusive interview with Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, on February 8 (this is an excerpt, read the full interview here):
Press TV: Iran’s formal announcement of enriching 20-percent uranium; great news for Iran. Can you give us more details?
Dr. Soltanieh: Yes, upon instruction of my government today, officially, I reflected to the agency the intention of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to start its nuclear enrichment activities of uranium up to 20%, I repeat up to 20%, in order to produce the required fuel for Tehran research reactor. This has been already officially delivered about 12 o’clock today Vienna time to the agency and then also in the evening. We received the acknowledgment of the letter and also in the letter I have invited the agency inspectors to be present as of tomorrow during this whole process, to show utmost transparency in our cooperation with the IAEA; then also in the acknowledgement letter this evening the agency informed us that the inspectors will be present and supervising the whole activity.
Press TV: If this capability was within Iran’s ability, why did it leave the option open for the West?
Dr. Soltanieh: Well, in fact, as you correctly said, we have in fact this capability, technological capability, because this is a fact that Iran has mastered the enriching technology but the government of Islamic Republic of Iran decided to open a window of opportunity for the others in order to enter into a new avenue, rather than confrontation, to come to cooperation, and while we receive the fuel for our research reactor within the framework of the IAEA the technical cooperation among member states will be enhanced.
Unfortunately, we waited so long, roughly about nine months, since I sent a letter to former [IAEA] director general, asking the agency to facilitate for this exchange of the fuel and receiving of the fuel. In fact, by coincidence, I am the same one that over 20 years ago, as ambassador to the IAEA at that time, wrote a letter to Director General Hans Blix, requesting the fuel for Tehran reactor and we finally had an agreement through the IAEA by Argentina we got the fuel and we paid for it. This time unfortunately, the potential suppliers put a condition. It means not only they wanted to receive the money but they wanted to receive the material which we have produced in Natanz. Now, again this was a test of the political will of parties concerned. During the negotiation, which was held 19th to 21st of October, and I had the honor to be in charge of the delegation and the negotiator, we in fact tried to show utmost flexibility. Therefore, we accepted and agreed to send the required material for the fuel outside. The only thing is, because of the past confidence deficit, we insisted on the modality which will give the guarantee that we will receive the fuel at the end of the day, and this was the best logical, technically-sound proposal that Iran made during that negotiation.
I have to remind you that after I wrote a letter to the director general and asked him to send to potential suppliers, the director general at the time Mr. Baradei only sent the letter of course to Russia and the US and they gave us a non-paper. In that non-paper, they gave this proposal that they wanted 1,200 kilograms to be sent to Russia for further enrichment and then further on, of course, France joined it in order to do fuel fabrication. That was, in fact the proposal of those countries. But, by mistake, during the last four months, in the media you have noticed that they are explaining that that was the Geneva proposal and those three countries accepted and Iran has not accepted that proposal. This is absolutely wrong, because that was the proposal of those three countries in fact. Therefore there was no surprise that they agreed with their own proposal. But our proposal was also on the table, which was very important as I explained to you: simultaneous exchange of LEU (low-enriched uranium) produced in Iran with the fuel which will be going to be produced outside. Simultaneous exchanges swap in Iran. It is that we are ready to show compromise to send the material out although we were not obliged to do so and get the fuel. Therefore the common denominator between these two proposals was that the material, the required material, the equivalent material, could be sent out. They should have welcomed this opportunity, but for the last eight months [or] more roughly close to nine months we have been desperately waiting and we tried not to in fact further elaborate for the media. We tried to let the diplomacy work. But, unfortunately, we have been disappointed that until now today there was no response to our proposal.
USAID funds an expensive power plant that may never be used in Afghanistan
President Karzai energizes a substation to begin the transfer of electricity from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. (Source: USAID)
A USAID funded, foreign constructed power plant in Afghanistan has become a money sink and may never be used by the local government due to its extravagant maintenance costs.
The diesel-powered plant is nearly complete, yet its future is uncertain, and events so far have been stitched with controversy. Pratap Chatterjee, in an IPS article, writes that, “three independent investigations into U.S.-financed reconstruction of the Afghan electricity sector, as well as IPS interviews with Afghan government officials and contractors, suggest that the power plant – which will cost taxpayers almost three times as much as comparable projects – may never be used.”
First the U.S. planners chose to ignore other ongoing reconstruction projects that were cheaper and more likely to succeed, or to pay attention to alternative recommendations from Afghan government officials.
Second, the planners picked expensive technologies that the city of Kabul could not afford to maintain or utilise.
The project was launched in 2007, as a joint venture between two US contractors, Louis Berger and Black & Veatch. In an earlier post, I had mentioned a previously bungled construction contract by Louis Berger. They had received a contract to build 1,000 schools, each costing US$274,000. The schools were built according to designs suitable for the US, not Afghanistan. They did not consider local climate, nor local cost considerations. The Afghan government not only has to worry about maintaining these expensive schools, they might not even be usable. In January 2009, Ann Jones, who for years worked in Afghanistan as an aid worker, said 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.”
The 105 megawatt power plant under construction is estimated to cost over US$300 million, the latest price tag being given after several cost hikes in the project’s life span.
Chatterjee writes that “the power plant is expected to be completed this spring. But the electricity is no longer urgent. One year ago, a 300-megawatt power line to Kabul from Uzbekistan was completed, with funding from the World Bank, German and Indian governments. The construction cost was just 35 million dollars and the operation costs are expected to be just over six cents a kilowatt hour compared to the 22 cents a kilowatt hour that it will cost to run the diesel plant.”
The contract was awarded by USAID under a cost-plus deal. Cost-plus contracts guarantee a set profit above the cost of projects. This has become a preferred form of contract for Western firms taking on US government contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The argument in favour of them is that, given the poor security conditions of these countries, and the uncertain costs of construction in a war zone, private firms want a guarantee of profits before they begin work. The problem here is that, in this schema, there is no incentive for contractors to limit costs, and they could very well gain by pushing them up and generating more work for themselves knowing full well that they will get their share of profits no matter what.
Chatterjee’s report revealed the following:
“This situation illustrates the twin policy evils of the cost-plus contracts,” says R. Scott Greathead, a New York lawyer who advised Symbion on the project. “First, they impose no cost or penalty on the cost-plus contractor for its incompetence, inefficiency or failure to perform, and second, they punish two victims, the fixed-price subcontractor, who incurs costs that may never be fully reimbursed, and the U.S. government, which pays in the end for everything.”
Construction of the power plant has been slowed by disagreements.
On May 19, 2009, Symbion [a subcontractor] stopped work – because Black & Veatch had failed to pay them for four months. A USAID Inspector General audit published in November 2009 found that Black & Veatch “had charged USAID for subcontractor costs that the contractor had not paid the subcontractor.”
The power plant, near Kabul, is said to cost nearly three times more than similar projects.
Afghanistan’s 2008 annual government revenue was estimated to be about US$685 million according to the minister of finance, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, during an interview with foreign press.
The UN in Afghanistan
The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs has available a report on Afghanistan examining attempts at state building. The report focuses on the role of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in coordinating foreign and domestic efforts.
UNAMA coordinates international efforts in Afghanistan and supported the recent elections. “These efforts include supporting the Government to improve governance and the rule of law and fight corruption, as well as facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”
The Norwegian report, UNAMA in Afghanistan, is intended to answer some key questions.
The conclusions drawn from Afghanistan will also form the basis for how future operations in ‘weak states’ are organized, which makes it important to get right the lessons to be learned. If the United Nations had taken a ‘heavy footprint’ approach, what would that have entailed in terms of resources and activities? Should the United Nations have served as a caretaker government for a certain period, for example? Should thousands of peacekeepers have been deployed? Should billions have been spent upfront on basic services? If that had been the case, would Afghanistan have been peaceful by now? And can we draw any generalizations from the Afghanistan experience to future endeavours? These are big questions, and this report will attempt to shed some light on them.
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.
