Juan Cole

Here's Juan Cole on Pakistan, overnight:

The seriousness of the situation in the streets of some of Pakistan's important towns and cities doesn't seem to me to be being reported in the US press and media. In contrast, Pakistani newspapers are giving chilling details of large urban centers turned into ghost towns on Friday morning, with no transport available, hundreds of thousands of persons stranded far from home, shops closed, and banks, gas stations, police stations and automobiles torched. Karachi, Hyderabad, Larkana, Sukkur, Jacobabad and many others in Sindh Province fell victim to the violence (Bhutto was from Larkana in Sindh but had a residence in Karachi). The police seemed to be AWOL for the most part in these cities, allowing the rioting and looting to go on unhindered. Here is a tally of violence in the major port city of Karachi (population 8 million) overnight, resulting from riots to protest the killing of Benazir Bhutto: Number of vehicles burned: 150 Number of streets where tires were set afire: 26 Number of banks set on fire: 16 Number of gas stations torched: 13 Number of persons shot dead: 10 Number of persons injured: 68 Number of PIA flights coming in: 0 Number of shops and businesses closed: Most

He concludes:

Folks, I've seen civil wars and riots first hand, and revolutions from not too far away, and this situation looks pretty bad to me.

The 8-Front War

Juan Cole does some math and delivers a clear estimation of who's fighting whom in Iraq.

How many fronts are there in the Iraq War? The Sunni Arab guerrillas of the center, west and north are themselves fighting a four-front war. They are fighting US troops. They are fighting Shiites. They are fighting Kurds in the Kirkuk region and Ninevah and Diyala provinces. And they are fighting other Sunni Arab forces (Baathists fight Salafi fundamentalists, and both fight tribal levies gravitating to the Americans).

Then there is a muted Shiite front with two dimensions. Radical Shiites attack US forces. And, in Basra, Diwaniya and elsewhere, there is Shiite on Shiite violence as the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (often infiltrated into the Iraqi police) fights the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.

So that makes 6-- four Sunni Arab fronts and 2 Shiite fronts.

Then there are the Kurds. Of course they are fighting the Sunni Arabs. But they have also given haven to two terrorist groups. One is the PKK, or Kurdish Worker's Party, which operates in Turkey's eastern Anatolia, blowing things up and killing people. Some 5,000 PKK fighters are holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan, to the rage of the Turkish government in Ankara. The other is PEJAK, an Iranian-Kurdish terrorist group that launches attacks in Iran. Both Iran and Turkey have lobbed mortars and artillery shells over the border into villages of Iraqi Kurdistan as a way of lodging a complaint and making a threat against these Kurdish forces.

Cole admits that not all 8 fronts are necessarily engaged in serious fighting simultaneously. Any one of these sites, however, can make bad trouble in the region worse. Flare-ups in fighting also put American troops at risk and make trouble for American war planners as they map strategies and assess the best of bad options.

My favorite part, though?

By the way, why does the Bush administration allow its Kurdistan allies to harbor PKK terrorists? I thought that sort of thing was a no-no in the age of the war on terror? Wasn't it even the casus belli for Bush's two big invasions? Or is it all right to do terrorism to Turkey and Iran, but not to the US and Britain? I'm confused.

When Juan Cole is confused you know it's a real mess.

Juan Cole on Tehran

Juan Cole offers fresh air on Iran:

Polling shows that the percentage of Americans who view Iran as the number one threat to the United States has risen to 27 percent now. I think it was only 20 percent in December 2006. First of all, how in the world can a developing country with about a fourth of the population of the US, about a $2000 per capita income (in real terms, not local purchasing power), with no intercontinental ballistic missiles, with no weapons of mass destruction (and no proof positive it is trying to get them), with a small army and a small military budget-- how is such a country a "threat" to the United States of America? Iranian leaders don't like the US, and they talk dirty about the US, and they do attempt to thwart US interests. The same is true of Venezuela under Chavez. But Tehran is a minor player on the world stage, and trying to build it up to replace the Soviet Union is just the worst sort of fear-mongering, and it is being done on behalf of the US military industrial complex, which wants to do to Iran what it did to Iraq. It is propaganda, and significant numbers of Americans (a 7 percent increase would be like 21 million people!) are buying it. (Emphasis mine)

Cole points out that, whether Iran is a credible threat or not, 21 million more Americans perceive Iran as the cardinal threat to American security than did just six months ago. I don't know how big a threat Iran really presents behind all the bluster. No one wants to see the country with a nuclear weapon, and yet I keep wondering if the country's nuclear pursuit isn't a martyr's game. Ahmadenijad has a great opportunity to gain the appearance of clout when there's a Dick Cheney across the ocean who is endlessly willing to validate the little man's insane posturing. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a kick if Tehran really was interested in nuclear energy (I'm not sure I believe this, but it's worth stopping to consider) and actually wanted Americans to blow our wad in an effort to disprove that peaceful pursuit was the order of the day. We'd go in, raise a bunch of dust, find no evidence of nuclear weapons development, and at the end of the day have nothing but George Bush's word that it was the right thing to do. Sound familiar?

As for Islamic extremists, the best they can hope for is to draw American forces yet further into the Middle East. They don't have to come to us because we're only too eager to come to them. If this is what's driving Iran, then shouldn't America just slow down? By this I mean we don't necessarily need our leaders to respond to sabre rattling with more of the same, and we don't need our media outlets to hard-sell us more hype and fear. As much now as ever before, we need thoughtfulness and cool-headedness, not to mention sound intelligence, as America assesses and approaches the Iranian problem.

Why Does al-Qaeda Keep Coming up in the Current Lebanon Coverage?

As the Lebanese army continues its assault on the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon in an attempt to root out members of the militant group Fatah (or Fath) al-Islam, I can't help but reflect on this observation from Juan Cole:

Al-Qaeda, at least as a vague franchise, still exists, and remains a major threat to the US. That is, however, mostly because opportunistic forces on the American Right would use any further attacks on the US to abrogate more of our constitutional rights. At the moment, al-Qaeda's biggest targets are other Muslims.

The emphasis is mine. Al-Qaeda, according to Cole, is currently more focused on attacking other Muslims, whom they see as "collaborators" with the U.S. and western European nations, than on actually attacking U.S. or western European targets (the notable exception, as I see it, being U.S. or Coalition troops in Iraq).

CNN reports that Fatah al-Islam is considered by some Lebanese officials to have ties to al-Qaeda, although it should be noted that al-Qaeda, in this sense, seems more a label of convenience referring to a group of radical Sunni fundamentalists--Cole refers to the Salafi Jihadi movement--rather than a specific indication that al-Qaeda, as it existed in 2001, has anything to do with Fatah al-Islam or the small group of fighters currently entrenched in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

What does it all mean? I sure don't know, but can't help but notice that the Lebanese army is engaged in heavy fighting with a band of pro-Syrian extremists effectively hiding behind Palestinian refugees; that the al-Qaeda name keeps being bandied about by the U.S. media as if it means something; and that there are, to my knowledge, no U.S. or European targets involved in the confrontation.

So who stands to gain when the al-Qaeda name is dropped into the newscast? I'm just wondering.

UPDATE: A U.N. aid convoy has been hit in the fighting. That, and White House spokesman Tony Snow suggests that Syria may play a role in all this. From the AP:

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the Fatah Islam militants want to disrupt the nation's security and distract international attention from a U.N. effort to establish a special tribunal try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

The United States "will not tolerate attmpts by Syria, terrorist groups or any others to delay or derail Lebanon's efforts to solidify its sovereignty or seek justice in the Hariri case," Snow said.