Category: Politics

Bin Laden’s Protectors in Pakistan

After a predictable wave of jingoistic euphoria, the death of Osama bin Laden has raised some troubling questions about Pakistan and discredited a lot of the previous conventional wisdom about his whereabouts. To summarize what we know:

  • Bin Laden was not constantly on the move, but had stayed in his final location for several years.
  • He was not in tribal areas near the Afghan border, but deep within Pakistan, not far from the capital.
  • He was in fact still operationally involved with al-Qaeda. He was by no means so preoccupied with evading detection that he could not continue to act as leader.

Regarding the U.S. operation against Bin Laden, it should be clear this was a “kill” mission from the beginning, as the original plan was to destroy the compound with a missile attack. It is hardly credible that trained SEALs would take a head shot to incapacitate an unarmed man if “capture” was a primary objective, rather than a contingency. The U.S. probably wants to minimize blowback by downplaying the cold-blooded nature of the assassination. Most noteworthy is how Obama’s bold disregard for Pakistani sovereignty (as promised in 2007) is praised even by liberals, as his predecessor Bush succeeded in raising American tolerance of overt imperial posturing. The world is our playground, so it seems.

What of the Pakistanis? It is clear by now that, contrary to Sec. Clinton’s initial attempt to emphasize the cooperation of Pakistan, this had been an exclusively American operation for almost a year. The Pakistanis had no knowledge of CIA surveillance in Abbottabad, and they were given no advance notice of the SEAL operation. In fact, the only reason they found out at all was because one of the helicopters crashed. Even then, the SEALs were on the way back to Afghanistan by the time planes were able to scramble. No magical radar-evading or radar-jamming technology was needed, as the helicopters were shaped to leave almost no radar image if they fly low enough, and they could not be sighted visually at night.

Bin Laden certainly had a support network in Pakistan, and it is credible that this included current or former members of the Pakistani military and intelligence service, which are known to contain radical Islamic sympathizers. Still, the high command is of more moderate, secular leanings, which means there was certainly a major intelligence failure on some level if the leadership was unaware of Bin Laden’s presence. The sometimes clumsy surveillance methods of Pakistani intelligence are well attested. Still, the required level of incompetence is not so great as one might think, considering that fortified compounds are commonplace in that part of Pakistan, and that the Americans entertained doubts about the compound for nine months before deciding there was enough evidence to act. The only reason they even found the compound was because they knew the identity and location of Bin Laden’s courier, who took great precaution not to leave an electronic trail to the hideout. Any official Pakistani support received must have been at a low level, judging from the negligible number of armed guards.

As for the civilian government, there is little reason to doubt that Zardari had no knowledge of any coverup, but he is a relatively weak leader in a country dominated by its military establishment. More than three years after the assassination of his wife lifted him to the leadership of his party on a surge of sympathy, the current president has sought to distance himself from his corrupt past, which earned him the nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent,” only to find a more dangerous situation in Pakistan, where top-level terrorists can operate with near impunity, under the noses of the military and security establishment. He is in the difficult situation of simultaneously claiming ignorance and competence.

The U.S., for its part, may be losing its propaganda touch, judging from its weak attempts to spin the released Bin Laden videos. “He dyed his beard and watched himself on television? How vain!” (Either that or he was trying to remove time indicators from his videos and learn what information the press had on him.) “He wore a blanket because he was cold? How frail!” If this is really the best they can do, then there is not much left of the American propaganda machine that Goebbels so admired. Still, even in their prime, Americans have had little of that Roman virtue of recognizing valor in an adversary (apart from the Civil War, where the enemies were Americans). If all our enemies must be cowardly and weak, it is remarkable that we expect to be praised for our victories.

Reflections on Egypt

As a rule, the masses will not revolt against even the worst government unless they are starving, and Egypt is no exception. Having endured the unpopular Mubarak regime for 30 years, Egyptians did not suddenly discover the internet or develop a stronger taste for democracy. What has happened in recent months is that food prices have escalated without an increase in government food subsidies, bringing an already impoverished society to its breaking point.

A nice graphical depiction of Egypt’s food and energy crisis can be found at The Oil Drum, showing how Egypt’s increased oil consumption is leading it to become an oil importing nation for the first time. Without the windfall of oil export revenues, the government can no longer subsidize its failed domestic economy to alleviate the cost of food and other necessities. Egyptians literally have nothing to lose by resisting a government that has denied them the means of subsistence.

Egypt’s problems are an extreme form of similar problems held throughout the Middle East, as global oil exports are down, and many Arab governments find themselves too cash-strapped to keep their populations fed by subsidies. Only in such extremes do we find genuinely spontaneous mass movements from the bottom up, which are not orchestrated by any political or military cadre. The success of the Egyptian revolution in a mere 18 days has removed the biggest obstacle to mass revolt, namely the fear that there is no chance of success.

Ironically, most of the Arab dictatorships came to power by leading populist movements that toppled Western-backed monarchs in the 1950s and 60s. Several of these regimes, facing the same economic problems as their predecessors, eventually became dependent on the US or the USSR for military aid in order to secure their rule. The nations with greater oil wealth could afford to deliver economic improvement to the lower classes, which was generally implemented through socialistic or statist programs. The inefficiencies of socialism led to attempts at privatization reforms, such as those enacted by Mubarak, but the implementation of these reforms reeked of cronyism and corruption, offering little tangible benefit to the lower classes.

The mass revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere have no discernible political program other than to get rid of the existing failed regime. It is by no means guaranteed that the long-term result of these revolutions will be parliamentary democracy. After all, that had been the intent of the 1952 revolution that resulted in Nasser taking charge of Egypt. The present Egyptian military has disavowed any intent to rule, but even civilian leadership in the Middle East often proves reluctant to relinquish power, once obtained. Whatever the form of the new government, it will face the same structural economic and social problems that brought down the previous regime, and free elections will not bring any miraculous solutions. Both the market economy and the social welfare state can bring their fair share of ills, as the wealthy nations of the West have recently learned or re-learned.

Much has been said of the role that so-called “social media” played in the Egyptian revolution. Such tools were undoubtedly helpful in coordinating mass revolts without the help of structured leadership, but they would have come to nought if there was not a broad determination among the people to persevere in their protests. The Egyptian government was astoundingly successful, from a technical perspective, in shutting down the Internet for five days, yet the protests persisted with even greater fervor and finally the government relented. Shortly after the revolution, Syria actually liberalized internet access, realizing that its suppression would only give the people one more occasion for discontent, as if you had cut off power or water or any other utility. The Internet does not create revolutions, but gives voice to discontent that is no less real if the nation is unplugged.

Leaks in Government Intelligence

The WikiLeaks scandal is exposing the internal contradictions of liberal democracy, which pretends to promote an open society while its heavily entrenched power structure relies on coercion and espionage. The hypocrisy of Western democracies is not a new thing; in fact, we can turn to the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to see how the principles of “liberty” and “equality” were often imposed by brute force or deceit.

The infamous “Reign of Terror” in revolutionary France was but the culmination of an increasingly aggressive secularism that had sought to turn the Church into an arm of the state with its Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791. Thousands of priests, aristocrats, and peasants who opposed the new order were killed or exiled. Similarly, in Mexico, the liberals, once securely in power, abolished the Catholic university, and eventually all public manifestations of Catholicism. Back in Europe, democratic and republican revolutions were prompted through coups and assassinations, including the infamous throat-slitting of Pellegrino Rossi, interior minister of the Papal States.

The use of secret societies, Masonic or otherwise, was a staple of liberal and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, as is well documented. In England, whose Protestant culture is also the product of a successful intrigue – the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 – and its cultural heir the United States, it has been common to dismiss such claims as paranoia, since they are vested in defending the legitimacy of the liberal power structure. In fact, the existence of a real Masonic conspiracy (as opposed to the various bugaboos of more recent times) was publicly exposed in France in 1904. In “l’Affaire des Fiches,” the anticlerical war minister General Louis Andre was found to have been determining promotions and denunciations on the basis of a card file he kept of who was a Catholic and who attended Mass. Both Andre and Prime Minister Emile Combes were Freemasons, and had acquired their information from the spy activities of the Masonic Grand Orient of France.

Once victorious in destroying the cultural infrastructure of its rivals, democrats hypocritically proclaim “freedom of education”, where all education dogmatically accepts the tenets of secular democracy, which is why, to a historically educated person, there is surprisingly little ideological diversity in modern academia. The dissenting academics having been purged or rendered impotent, a new form of coercion is free to impose itself. It is only through a historically inaccurate demonization of previous forms of government that our modern Western governments can pretend to any virtue.

After the outbreak of the First World War, the governments of the West gradually abandoned any notion of aristocratic honor, and learned to wage war and peace mercilessly. Apart from the mechanical destruction of much of Europe’s cultural patrimony in the two world wars, there arose intelligence agencies that took the ancient art of espionage to new levels, systematically intercepting communications even of allies, and attempting to corrupt foreign citizens into betraying their governments (i.e., act as “agents”). The U.S. and Britain were most advanced in this regard, especially in the aftermath of World War II.

In the U.S., the presence of an agency that systematically violates personal privacy would run into constitutional problems. These were circumvented by allowing the CIA only to spy on foreigners, and by collaborating with the FBI, which spies on U.S. citizens in the name of police security. The NSA can spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by making use of data gathered by British collaborators. Between the U.S. and the U.K., no one’s information is safe, as was proved by the infamous scandal of the U.S. and U.K. spying on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other officials.

We know from bitter experience that the U.S. and its allies are ruthlessly amoral when it comes to espionage – absolutely nothing is exempt from the catchall excuse of “security”. The successful 9/11 attacks only allowed the U.S. to declare openly what it had already been doing in secret for decades: illegally spying on its own citizens, and detaining people in foreign prisons for years without trial. A majority of the docile public actually supports these policies. So much for their supposed love of liberty.

Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have lain bare the contradictions of our liberal establishment, which demands that we respect the authority of governments that were founded by murdering and destroying the previous social order throughout the nineteenth century. Liberal democracy, at its core, was founded on intrigue and brute force, so it is only fitting that it clings to power by using coercive tactics against its citizens. We should find it blessedly ironic, then, that the government of Sweden makes use of its extraordinarily liberal laws regarding sexual consent as an excuse to arrest Assange shortly after his latest wave of embarassing leaks. Liberal efforts to defend women, the poor, and the disabled are really designed to pit the citizenry in competition with one another, always asserting their rights against each other, rather than joining forces against their real enemy.

When the core of the liberal democratic establishment (and I use “liberal” in the classical sense, which includes today’s so-called “conservatives”) is challenged, it is remarkable how everyone suddenly marches in lockstep. Credit card companies refuse to process payments, hosting companies drop the site, and even the ostensibly neutral ICANN takes away the domain name ‘wikilieaks.org’. It is chilling how all the powers in the world can line up against someone and try to suppress them, even on the supposedly free and open Internet.

Fortunately, there are countermeasures available. Already, a host of mirror sites have been created, and there are even instructions online for creating a mirror site. Supporters of Wikileaks have initiated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against some of the companies that tried to kill the original site. While such activity is illegal, it is surprisingly easy to accomplish, as are other forms of online hacking. A person needs only to set himself up behind a proxy in a country that does not forward tracking records to the U.S. or other Western countries, or simply login through a neighboring wireless network. These tricks and other hacking tools can be found by searching on the scraper site Scroogle, which lets you search without being tracked by Google.

The weapons of the hacker can provide a potent counterbalance to the temerity of our governments, which pretend that they own you and have the right to spy on you or do whatever they want with you, but heaven forbid that you should find out what they are doing. These illegitimate usurpers, who use public authority for private aggrandizement, should be thankful that we do not do anything worse to them.