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In recent months, the U.S. has claimed substantial progress in Iraq’s security situation, resulting from its new approach of enlisting the aid of Sunni leaders in the battle against Islamic militants. While the support of local government is undoubtedly essential to any successful counter-terrorism measures, enlisting former supporters of Saddam Hussein to crack down on militant Islamists revives the ghost of the Reagan administration’s “realist” foreign policy that led to support of Saddam’s brutal regime in the first place.

The U.S. military asserts that 75% of al-Qaeda networks in Iraq have been destroyed. This is an unverifiable claim, since terrorist networks are secretive by design, so we cannot know with any certainty how many there are, much less how many are affiliated with al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, a measurable decrease in the incidence of terrorist attacks is evidence that these groups are less effective and less numerous, while the legitimization of local Sunni leaders has diminished the incentive for sectarian violence, so that the insurgency is largely reduced to Islamic extremists.

Overall statistics bear out the view that the security situation in Iraq is improving. Iraqi deaths from violence have decreased substantially in the last six months, returning to 2005 levels. Civilian deaths are slightly higher than 2005 levels, while Iraqi security force deaths are substantially lower. US military deaths in recent months have decreased to the lowest levels since the occupation began. These trends suggest a disengagement between the security forces and the guerrillas, as the latter pursue softer targets.

While the recent surge in U.S. troop strength was probably a contributing factor to the decrease in violence, we should not overlook other important developments, such as the six-month ceasefire announced in August by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army in August, which neatly coincides with the most dramatic drop in violent deaths. Most importantly, former Sunni insurgents are now aiding the Americans in the fight against al-Qaeda and its imitators. The decrease in violence may therefore come at a great price, by legitimizing former Saddam loyalists, who may compete with Moqtada al-Sadr as domestic power brokers in Iraq. Although al-Qaeda in Iraq is presently the most immediate physical security threat, it is probably the least of the long-term threats to Iraqi peace, as all the major players, from the Sunni militias to Sadr’s Shi’a supporters and their Iranian allies, have no interest in seeing a militant Wahhabist Sunni state such as al-Qaeda seeks. However, their competing interests remain no less real, and the political failures of the Iraqi government are no less transparent, so that their remains a real threat of partition or civil war, though the fighting has stopped at least for now.

Which is more shameful: Pervez Musharraf’s moves toward dictatorship, or Benazir Bhutto’s posturing as an advocate of democracy? The current crisis in Pakistan has more than a little to do with the U.S.-orchestrated return of Ms. Bhutto to Pakistani politics, reinventing herself as an advocate of civil liberty. Bhutto’s actual record paints a very different picture, reflecting an all too common populist practice of using democracy as a rhetorical device to promote one’s own power interest. The complicity of the United States in this bungled powersharing reveals how even the most vocal exponents of liberal democratic theory can have Machiavellian attitudes toward its implementation.

Benazir Bhutto’s political career is tainted by extravagant corruption, human rights abuses, racism, and complicity with terrorism. In her two terms as prime minister, she lived an opulent lifestyle thanks in large part to her husband Asif Zardari’s acceptance of bribes from foreign governments and contractors, earning himself the nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent”. Ms. Bhutto’s partisans have tried to argue that the allegations of corruption were fabricated by her political enemies in Pakistan, despite the fact that the governments of Switzerland, Poland and France have independently charged her regime with corruption and money laundering. In particular, the French have their own document trail showing that Dassault was given an exclusive contract to sell fighters to Pakistan in exchange for paying 5% commission to a corporation owned by Zardari. Bhutto and her husband accumulated over £740 million in their Swiss bank accounts. Her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which ruled 1988-90 and 1993-97, was twice dismissed from power because of corruption charges. Ms. Bhutto left Pakistan in 1998 to escape prosecution, and her recent return to Pakistan was conditioned upon amnesty for all corruption charges. She was even allowed access to her Swiss bank accounts!

The Bush administration has gone to considerable lengths to rehabilitate this dirty politician, even if they recognize that Musharraf remains the best hope for stability in Pakistan against Islamic terrorism. The administration’s calls for free and open elections might be regarded less skeptically were it not for the transparent efforts to place Bhutto as a counterweight to Musharraf. Ms. Bhutto is a strange poster child for democracy, since she is not subject to any party primaries, declaring herself party leader for life. Further, her reign (and that of her father) was filled with human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial killings, as reported by Amnesty International in 1997 and 1998.

The real reason for the U.S. attempt to shift the power balance in Pakistan is dissatisfaction with Musharraf’s handling of the “war on terrorism.” The U.S. has long tolerated Musharraf’s military regime out of security considerations, namely the protection of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from Islamic militants, and cooperation in hunting al-Qaeda criminals along the border with Afghanistan. Despite Musharraf’s strongly cooperative posture in anti-terrorism efforts since 2002, he has drawn the line at allowing U.S. troops into Pakistan. This stance, combined with his apparent concessions to local tribes protecting Islamic militants, has practically guaranteed a safe haven in Pakistan for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The stagnation on this front can be seen by the lack of progress in locating Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, as well as the increasingly audacious acts of sabotage and assassination attempts by Pakistani militants.

It is by no means clear that Ms. Bhutto and her party would fare better in counter-terrorist efforts, especially given their track record. In 1996, Bhutto formally recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and covertly funded the regime through her interior ministry. Domestically, she took a decidedly racial attitude toward terrorism, blaming it primarily on the dark-skinned Muhajirs, whom she derided as “rats” in a 1995 speech to a Punjabi audience, adding that they “do not have the same blood in their veins as you and I have.” Ironically, Ms. Bhutto herself is of the minority Sindhi race, so to gain acceptance among Punjabis, she has had to pander to popular contempt for the Muhajirs, who are not regarded as Pakistanis. Accordingly, under the guise of counterterrorism, Bhutto prevented the Muhajir political party from participating in local elections in 1996. Today, the most famous Muhajir is Gen. Musharraf.

Bhutto’s obvious flaws are overlooked by many in the West largely because she is a very comforting figure from a Western perspective. The fair-skinned Bhutto was educated in Western schools from her childhood, before moving on to Harvard and Oxford, so she seems like a Westerner and might be assumed to have a similar admiration for liberal democracy. This assumption might have too much truth in it, since, like her Western counterparts, Bhutto values the rhetoric of democracy above its practice. True to this pragmatism, it is enough for most Westerners that Bhutto is pro-Western, regardless of whether she is pro-democracy. The neoconservatives hope that Bhutto will allow U.S. troops in Pakistan, while the liberals naively suppose she will enhance the status of women in Pakistan, ignorant of her prior record of upholding Muslim exceptions to international standards on women’s rights. More broadly, conservative and liberal Westerners alike have a deep-seated contempt for traditional Islam, whether because of its opposition to Christianity and its supposed association with violence, or because of its refusal to conform to modern liberal notions of individual liberty and gender equality. Bhutto is a less traditional Muslim figure, which is good from both liberal and conservative Western perspectives, as both factions want to see Islam secularized and weak.

This meddling in the domestic affairs of Pakistan has already resulted in hundreds of deaths and provoked Musharraf to declare a state of emergency rule. The needlessly provocative re-entry of Bhutto into Pakistan could have been avoided by merely rehabilitating her party without restoring its controversial leader. The United States evidently sees something it likes in Ms. Bhutto specifically, perhaps the fact that she is the only other figure in Pakistan with sufficient charisma to serve as a counterweight to Musharraf. The Bush administration is not seeking to overthrow Musharraf, so much as to chasten him into changing policy. Unlike previous U.S. clients such as Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, Musharraf remains useful, if not indispensable, to American strategic interests, so there is no motive to depose him. In fact, his loss of power would bring likely chaos and possible Islamic rule, which is a common reaction to center-left Western-supported regimes like Bhutto’s would be. It is likely that the near-catastrophic consequences of this intervention have gone far beyond what the Americans expected, so that the U.S. faces the real possibility of having inadvertently precipitated its worst-case scenario for Pakistan.

Update (27 Dec 2007)

Today Benazir Bhutto was tragically assassinated in a terrorist attack. In the next few weeks or months, we will return to this issue as the implications of this event become clear. It remains to be seen how the PPP may re-invent itself with new leadership, or to what extent Musharraf’s forces are responsible for such security breaches. What is clear now is that Western intervention in Pakistani politics carries grave perils and can easily result in unintended chaos.

Apparently, it isn’t torture if it doesn’t leave a mark, or so we are led to believe by the recent study approving the safety of tasers. Since the electric stun devices cause serious injuries in only 3 out of 1000 cases, we should not be concerned that they are unsafe, notwithstanding the fact that the increasing frequency of their use may make even this low rate result in thousands of injuries, including over 200 fatalities already, according to Amnesty International. This debate over safety ignores what should be the more obvious issue: that any use of a 50,000-volt shock stick will result in excruciating pain far beyond that received by beatings or other practices commonly regarded as torture. It seems that a practice is not torture, no matter how intense the pain, so long as the duration is brief and no lasting injury results.

For those wondering how such a simple technology did not achieve widespread use until the 1990s, this is to be accounted for by Taser International’s development of a firing system without gunpowder, so that the device is no longer regarded as a firearm under the notoriously lax gun laws in the U.S. Selling the devices to police departments across the country enabled Taser to expand abroad, where the devices have met much more mixed reception, sometimes being withdrawn from use after a trial period. People in other countries tend to object more strenuously to being treated like cattle.

Apart from its use of twin tethered darts for long-range deployment, the taser is essentially a cattle prod for humans. The short-range stun gun end of the weapon is in fact the same device as a cattle prod, modified only in appearance and voltage. Of course, the taser does more than stun its victim, but sends searing pain through every nerve in the body, causing even the toughest men to scream in agony, as they experience what might be called maximal pain, if only for a few seconds. Even involuntary functions are affected, so the victim loses control of breathing and excretion, and even the heartbeat is affected. Victims with pacemakers or heart conditions can be sent into cardiac arrhythmia. Neurological conditions can also be aggravated, but these sorts of complications are only to be expected from a device that simply electrocutes the entire body for several seconds, in eerie reminiscence of the electroshock “therapy” previously favored by psychiatrists in the treatment of mental patients. The real purpose of the device, whether for cattle, mental patients, or persons under arrest, is coercion.

Here we arrive at the crux of the taser problem: whether it is licit to administer excruciating pain simply to obtain the compliance of a suspect. We should note that even the threat of the use of a taser can obtain this end. It is one thing to use a taser in substitution of a firearm, but more commonly they are used as simple coercion devices in situations where a firearm would be totally inappropriate. The belief that police have a right to use a taser when a suspect is simply being non-compliant or resisting arrest entails the belief that a suspect never has the right to be non-compliant or to resist arrest. Even in the law-enforcement-heavy United States, federal courts have ruled that a suspect has a right to resist unlawful arrest. Giving police the power to enforce compliance through torture undermines this right of resistance, and indeed can be used even against those not under arrest, such as public protesters.

The taser’s predecessor, the cattle prod, has a long history as a torture device, used in regimes such as Baathist Iraq during interrogations of political prisoners. Electrocution sticks are an effective torture weapon, since they can be administered repeatedly to the victim without injury or diminished effectiveness. They generally leave no mark or other evidence of their use. In other words, the very features which the proponents of the taser tout as evidence of its safety are what make it an effective and easily abused torture device. For every act of police brutality caught on film, there are many others that are not, so it is the height of irresponsibility to entrust officers with a weapon that leaves no evidence of its use or abuse.

Setting aside the more egregious abuses, any use of the taser as a compliance device undermines a citizen’s right not to be punished without a trial, as well as his status as a citizen equal in stature to the arresting officer. The pain inflicted by a taser is at least comparable to that of flogging, which we now hypocritically regard as barbaric, though at least in English common law, it was used as a punishment after conviction by jury. Not only are the police now empowered to inflict punishment without a trial, but the threat of this type of coercion creates an environment where citizens cannot speak freely with officers, for fear that any non-compliance will be punished. This undermines citizenship itself, as anyone interacting with a police officer is immediately placed in a subordinate position, bound to comply with any instruction reasonable or unreasonable under pain of electrocution.

If most people are content to be treated like cattle, or rather to have others treated like cattle, secure in the confidence that they will never be among the unfortunates, then the considerations discussed above will have no impact on public policy. On the other hand, for those of us who demand citizenship, we must recognize that police who use the threat of torture to obtain compliance are enemies of republican government, as are their “pro-law-enforcement” political enablers. These enemies of society should be opposed at every level, through financial, political, and physical resistance.

Fascistic tendencies in the United States are not limited to criminal law enforcement, but are expanded into the military sphere, where “pain boxes” are being developed that can inflict intense, incapacitating pain remotely over an entire region through electromagnetic transmission. It is easy to see how such a device could bring entire cities to submission, and make modern warfare even more cowardly than our current practice of dropping precision munitions from high altitudes at night. Such a device would have been of interest to many fascistic regimes, but it is difficult to see why a freedom-loving country would have any interest whatsoever in this form of coercion, though this is the same country that developed the neutron bomb. These ghouls who devote their energies to finding new, exotic ways to kill or coerce people should be opposed from below, and the beast of their creation must be killed by draining its political and financial lifeblood.