UPDATE 2: So why are they making it seem like Uganda is one big hellhole because of Kony, because it's not.

UPDATE 1: This is the same narrative about Africa that we have seen for centuries.

Hat tip to Jews sans frontieres.

INITIAL POST: Blissfully, I live outside the universe of viral videos, so I only heard about the Invisible Children one about Joseph Kony and the Lords Resistance Army indirectly. I admit that I am late to the story, but I will share my responses: First, if Americans really care that much about gruesome, militaristic violence, they should confront the brutalities inflicted upon others around the world by their own government, instead of supporting a call for more US military assistance for a Uganda military known for its own human rights abuses.

Second, I thought, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Over the course of my life, Americans have flocked to claims that leaders of color are one of the primary sources of global violence. Mao, Castro, Arafat, Gaddafi, Noriega, Aidid, Hussein, Bin Laden, Ahmajinedad . . and, now, Kony. With the passage of time, succeeding figures have been described in more and more lurid terms that highlights their foreign, uniquely perverse character, paradoxically in contradictory ways, contrast, for example, the hedonism of Gaddafi, Noriega and Hussein with the puritanical extremism of Bin Laden and Ahmajinedad. If we could just get rid of these evil demons, the world would be such a wonderful place. The root of this phenonmenon go all the way back to the extermination of Native Americans by, first, the Spanish, and then, the US, with the whites of the time condemning the indigenous population for the interwoven existence of these seemingly oppositional attributes within their non-Christian cultures. As then, anyone who suggests that we should understand the circumstances that give rise to them and seek to address these conditions, instead of putting them on wanted posters, is frequently maligned as an apologist. Callum McCormick has aptly observed that any effort to comprehend the current situation in Uganda as anything more than a binary moral opposition is rejected as an unnecessary complication.

Predictably, one rarely encounters powerful white political figures presented in this way, consider, for example, Donald Rumsfeld, who, as Secretary of Defense, approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against Guantanamo detainees, personally monitoring the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. People like Rumsfeld are able to escape such condemnation because their violence is displaced by modern communications technology and allegedly objective processes for developing information and making administrative decisions, much in the same way that CIA officers evaded responsibility for the mass killings and torture associated with the Phoenix Program and Operation Condor. In the end, the outward appearance of rationality associated with the modernist effort to transform societies still afflicted by the residue of primitivism exonerates them. If Kony had come from an elite Uganda family and attended Harvard or Oxford prior to returning to Uganda to impose austerity with the assistance of a repressive security apparatus, he would be praised in the US media as an exemplary example, regardless of the number of child victims.

Curiously, the Israelis, perceived in a Eurocentric way, also avoid such a characterization, despite a documented history of calculated state violence in Lebanon and the occupied territories. Of course, it is not the fault of Invisible Children that many Americans reflexively respond in this way, but it is, whether consciously or not, exploiting a fundamentally neoconservative, racist discourse that privileges the state sanctioned violence of the US and its allies over others. If the objective is to truly help the people of Uganda, then an approach different from the failed, purportedly humanitarian interventions of the last 25 years should be considered. Otherwise, the arrest and trial of Kony, as sought by Invisible Children, is likely to be noteworthy for giving someone an opportunity to take his place. It would also be conveniently consistent with the rules of the game, whereby violent political figures in opposition to US interests risk finding themselves being prosecuted in The Hague for crimes against humanity, while similarly situated US allies have received billions in assistance.

Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, Alternative Media, NGOs, Political Violence, YouTube

UPDATE: For a media chronology of how the Pentagon disseminated the lie that the WikiLeaks document release endangered people who had worked with the US occupation in Afghanistan, consider reading this article by Glenn Greenwald.

INITIAL POST: Remember this from August?

Want a good, shorthand way to determine if an NGO is collaborating with the occupation in Afghanistan? Look and see if they are scrambling to climb aboard the US public relations campaign against wikileaks. So far, we have Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, and, now, Reporters Without Borders:

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed incredible irresponsibility when posting the documents online.

The presence of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George Soros, is an interesting one. Perhaps, it is to be expected that an NGO funded by a currency speculator is, at the end of the day, supportive of the violent modernization project underway in Afghanistan. Indeed, don't all of these organizations rely upon such an endeavor for their very existence?

Well, here's the update:

With a new round of document leaks from the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks expected on Monday, a separate leak of a letter related to a previous leak suggests administration claims regarding the risks to intelligence sources were, as with so many statements beforehand, a lie.

The August letter, from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin (D – MI), conceded that the WikiLeaks documents related to the Afghan War did not expose any sensitive intelligence sources. He insisted the documents were still a threat to national security.

The private letter was released at roughly the same time that Secretary Gates and other Pentagon officials were making public proclamations about the number of people WikiLeaks had potentially killed in releasing the information.

No doubt all five of the organizations that rushed to the microphone to malign WikiLeaks have been rewarded handsomely for their participation in this recent PSYOPS campaign.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, NGOs, US Military

Last weekend, British aid worker Linda Norgrove was killed in Afghanistan during a rescue attempt after she had been abducted by insurgents in the mountainous eastern part of the country. It was initially reported that she had been killed by her abductors, but it now appears that she was killed by a Navy SEAL after she had gotten away from the insurgents and lay in a foetal position to avoid harm.

But the purpose of this post is not to discuss the propriety and execution of the rescue mission. There is an ongoing discussion of this subject in the British media. Instead, I am curious about what the death of Norgrove reveals about the delivery of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan. Peter Beaumont of The Guardian described Norgrove as an aid worker associated with Developmental Alternatives, Inc. She was specifically working on a DAI project funded by the United States Agency for International Develoment, commonly known as USAID, in eastern Afghanistan, a project described as the Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives for the North, East and West Program.

According to DAI:

Afghan farmers cultivate opium poppy because they need to feed their families. For many poor rural Afghans, poppy is the only reliable source of cash, credit, and access to cropland to supplement subsistence farming. Sometimes, coercion is also a factor. IDEA-NEW is designed to dissuade Afghans from growing poppy by increasing access to licit, commercially viable, alternative sources of income.

In alliance with Mercy Corps and ACDI/VOCA, DAI adopts a technical approach that DAI used with tangible success in USAID/Afghanistan’s Alternative Development Program–Eastern Region. This approach defines program interventions with reference to customers, uses value chain techniques to reveal customer needs, and then provides tailored, customer-specific incentives to help meet those needs.

The IDEA-NEW project builds on DAI's successful work in the eastern part of the country and extends it into the north. Its primary customers are the communities where poppy is (or is likely to be) cultivated. Infrastructure is our point of entry to a community because the immediate needs of farmers and villagers typically consist of building or repairing basic infrastructure—including roads from farm to market, irrigation, electricity, and cold storage. We offer technical expertise and cash-for-labor.

DAI’s value chain analysis reveals opportunities and high-priority needs, prioritizes subsectors, targets markets, reveals comparative advantages and weak links, and indicates how best to improve value chain functioning and increase community participation in viable value chains. Our diverse program interventions—including efforts to expand private sector activity—then address identified needs by exploiting the opportunities in collaboration with community leaders, government ministries and agencies, and the private sector.

DAI identifies USAID as the client for the project, and Beaumont concisely explains the purpose of the program as follows: A large part of the effort was focused on rebuilding local infrastructure, part of a programme seen as key to denying the Taliban its support among the Afghan population. In other words, Norgrove was a participant in the US military counterinsurgency program there that goes under the acronym COIN.

Accordingly, it is no wonder that the insurgents considered her an adversary. Given her involvement in a pacification project that the US military openly promotes as a part of the war effort, media characterizations of her as merely an aid worker don't fully capture the true nature of her activity in Afghanistan. For example, consider this excerpt from Beaumont's article:

DAI's president, James Boomgard, said: This is devastating news. We are saddened beyond words by the death of a wonderful woman whose sole purpose in Afghanistan was to do good – to help the Afghan people achieve a measure of prosperity and stability in their everyday lives as they set about rebuilding their country. Linda loved Afghanistan and cared deeply for its people, and she was deeply committed to her development mission. She was an inspiration to many of us here at DAI and she will be deeply missed.

At least Beaumont acknowledged that USAID funded Norgrove's project. David Harrison couldn't find any space to mention it in an obituary published in the London Telegraph.

Beyond this mystification, there are also the perils associated with her efforts to facilitate a modernization project in a region where much of the populace remains hostile to centralized state authority. Perhaps, it is impolite to say it at this sad time, but there is hint of what Edward Said described as orientalism in the accounts of her enthusiasm for her work, such as, in addition to the ones of Beaumont and Harrison, this one in the New York Times, although the reporters themselves may be responsible for it.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, Neoliberalism, NGOs, US Military

For my initial post on the subject of politically expedient NGOs and the WikiLeaks release, go here. A lingering issue has been the extent to which WikiLeaks endangered people in Afghanistan by releasing the records without checking with the Pentagon. This was a central assumption of six NGOs, Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the Kabul office of the International Crisis Group, and Reporters Without Borders, who criticized wikileaks for the release.

Turns out that WikiLeaks did offer to allow the Pentagon to identify the names of individuals who might have been at risk if their names were not edited out of the documents it subsequently released, as it is doing again now. Why is the Pentagon being so obstinate, when it has embraced previous requests by the mainstream media? Could it possibly be because the Pentagon wants to prosecute WikiLeaks for encouraging the theft of classified government documents, and any such prosecution would be impaired, perhaps, fatally so, by treating WikiLeaks the same as media organizations who have a constitutional right to release such records? In light of this, is there any chance that the six NGOs who sided with the Pentagon will now publicly repudiate their action? Didn't think so.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, Death Squads, NGOs, US Military

UPDATE: Want a good, shorthand way to determine if an NGO is collaborating with the occupation in Afghanistan? Look and see if they are scrambling to climb aboard the US public relations campaign against WikiLeaks. So far, we have Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, and, now, Reporters Without Borders:

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed incredible irresponsibility when posting the documents online.

The presence of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George Soros, is an interesting one. Perhaps, it is to be expected that an NGO funded by a currency speculator is, at the end of the day, supportive of the violent modernization project underway in Afghanistan. Indeed, don't all of these organizations rely upon such an endeavor for their very existence? Of course, the notion that the Pentagon cares about civilian deaths in Afghanistan remains risible, no matter how often CIVIC tries to persuade us to the contrary.

INITIAL POST: In April 2005, Marla Ruzicka, a US humanitarian worker who documented civilian casualties in Iraq, was killed. In one of my first posts here, I expressed sadness about her death, while describing her political approach to the war in Iraq as fundamentally misguided:

One need only visit the website of the organization that Ruzicka created, CIVIC Worldwide, to recognize the problem. CIVIC, you see, stands for The Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict. Accordingly, it promotes the pernicious distinction between innocent Iraqis, Iraqis who decline to violently resist the occupation, and other, guilty Iraqis who do not. Such a perspective, coming from an American organization, is morally myopic, if not morally offensive, given that it condemns Iraqis for violently resisting their own personal and economic victimization by the Occupation Authority. It is indistinguishable from the one continually advanced by the US military.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising as it is the inevitable consequence of Ruzicka's decision, after the start of the war, to sever her association with Global Exchange, a non-profit that organized against the war and now condemns the occupation, because she believed that she could subsequently accomplish more by working with the US rather than against it. It is tempting to dismiss the significance of her politics as the result of her political naivete. After all, according to Corn, she reportedly told a friend, My long-term goal is to get a desk at the State Department that looks at civilian casualties.

Not surprisingly, we now discover that CIVIC is providing NGO cover for the US government's public relations assault upon WikiLeaks:

A group of human-rights organizations is pressing WikiLeaks to do a better job of redacting names from thousands of war documents it is publishing, joining the list of critics that claim the Web site's actions could jeopardize the safety of Afghans who aided the U.S. military.

The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.

The human-rights groups involved are Amnesty International; Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC; Open Society Institute, or OSI, the charitable organization funded by George Soros; Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; and the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, or ICG.

Furthermore, in a statement posted on its website, CIVIC rationalizes the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan:

There are tragic stories of civilian loss in these 70,000 database entries, some that likely could have been avoided and some that seem like honest, horrible mistakes. Either way, they've got to be analyzed so lessons can be drawn. Certainly every incident of civilian harm deserves a full investigation.

To really understand a war and its implications, the human cost should be weighed against strategic considerations. The two go hand-in-hand. That's particularly true in Afghanistan, where commanders now realize the people are the main strategic consideration.

CIVIC has analyzed over 2,000 of entries thus far. We are looking specifically for information about civilian casualties caused by escalation of force incidents, with the goal of better understanding the impact of changes to the rules of engagement and tactical directives during the years these reports cover. To really understand what these documents mean both individually and collectively, we need to be aware of what they are and what they are not. They are, for the most part, spot reports -- one person's documentation of an incident transmitted through various means and held in a database. They do not, however, include much context, for example in-depth reports or investigations. The conclusions we can draw may therefore be limited.

Am I the only person who read this statement, and thought that CIVIC is playing both sides, trying to exploit the release to carve out a private contractor niche for itself as a Pentagon friendly outside investigator of civilian casualties even as it participates in the US campaign against WikiLeaks? In any event, the deferential tone of the statement is predictable, because if you read the list of 2009 accomplishments provided by CIVIC, one can only draw the conclusion that its existence is dependent upon policies of war without end pursued by the US:

•Advocating and helping design a new US program for Pakistani war victims, for which Congress appropriated $10 million


•Training US officers and enlisted forces, and contributing to new Army policies on civilian harm;


•Authoring the only civilian-authored article in the Escalation of Force handbook now being issued to deployed troops;


•Conferring by invitation with top military officers, government officials and policymakers on how to improve help for civilians harmed in conflict;


•Pressing international forces in Afghanistan for a new compensation policy for civilian casualties, a recommendation supported by Gen. Stanley McChrystal;


•Helping tell the story of Iraqi war victims through a critically acclaimed off-Broadway drama;


•Creating a global movement, the Making Amends Campaign, to change the outcome of war for civilians;


•Building the Making Amends Campaign coalition with a steering committee comprised of Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Handicap International USA;


•Convincing Security Council delegations that ‘making amends’ was an important new issue under protection of civilians for the international community

A closer examination of the list shows that CIVIC is apparently very good at seizing upon opportunities created by the Obama administration. With Obama expanding the purported war on terror into Pakistan, we discover that CIVIC is helping design a new US program for Pakistani war victims, for which Congress appropriated $10 million. Regrettably, CIVIC is a NGO dedicated to the practice of the political expediency that so characterized Ruzicka's time in Iraq. It may also be something of a bellwether. After all, if we see items on their website related to Iran or South America, we have cause to be concerned.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, Air War, Death Squads, NGOs, US Military