Introduction: Terrorism and the State

On 11 September 2001, the United States of America awoke to horrifying images of airplanes ?ying into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Within a span of forty-five minutes, the Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, killing 2752 people (www.cnn.com, 29 October 2003), and the United States was set on a path by George W. Bush’s Administration to defend itself from the threat of terror. On 20 September 2001, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and delivered a speech that began with these words:

The State and Terrorism: National Security and the Mobilization of Power

By Joseph H. Campos
Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007

Contents:
Introduction: Terrorism and the State
1. The State in a Time of Terror
2. National Security Discourse on Terrorism in Cold War Presidential Rhetoric
3. National Security Discourse on Terrorism in Post-Cold War Presidential Rhetoric
4. Once They Were Human
5. State Versus Terror
6. Language, Knowledge, and Power in the Name of the State

Sanctioning Iran: If Only It Were So Simple

By Suzanne Maloney
Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Washington Quarterly, January 2010

(Suzanne Maloney is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy and formerly served on the policy planning staff of the Department of State. She can be reached at smaloney@brookings.edu.)

For U.S. policymakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to pose a dilemma because of the unpredictability of the problem on one hand, and the invariability of available U.S. policy instruments on the other. While the Iranian threat has been perennial, Tehran’s internal political dynamics and its external conduct have evolved considerably, and unexpectedly. Although Iran’s challenge has grown more complicated over the years, the landscape of U.S. policy options has remained consistent-and frustratingly limited-for most of the past three decades.

How Corruption Compromises World Peace and Stability? – 2

By Robert I. Rotberg

Nigeria and Other Corrupted Countries

The other case studies contained in this volume are equally brutal in their surveys of political and largely internal corruption in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria and in the six other country cases discussed by Rose-Ackerman and Koechlin and Sepúlveda Carmona. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is unlike Russia and largely devoid of transnational implications and trafficking, but Nigeria is implicated in a raft of transnational activity and is heavily involved in almost every form of cross-border and transcontinental illicit action, even the smuggling of children as slave labor.

How Corruption Compromises World Peace and Stability? – 1

By Robert I. Rotberg

Corruption is a human condition and an ancient phenomenon. From Mesopotamian times, if not before, public notables have abused their offices for personal gain; both well-born and common citizens have sought advantage by corrupting those holding power or controlling access to perquisites. The exercise of discretion, especially forms of discretion that facilitate or bar entry to opportunity, is a magnetic impulse that invariably attracts potential abusers. Moreover, since nearly all tangible opportunities are potentially zero-sum in their impact on individuals or classes of individuals, it is almost inevitable that claimants will seek favors from authorities and that authorities, in turn, appreciating the strength of their positions, will welcome inducements.

Corruption, Global Security, and World Order

World Peace Foundation and American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2009

Contents

1. How Corruption Compromises World Peace and Stability – Robert I. Rotberg
2. Defining Corruption: Implications for Action – Laura S. Underkuffler
3. Defining and Measuring Corruption: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Now, and What Matters for the Future? – Nathaniel Heller
4. Corruption in the Wake of Domestic National Conflict – Susan Rose-Ackerman
5. Kleptocratic Interdependence: Trafficking, Corruption, and the Marriage of Politics and Illicit Profits – Kelly M. Greenhill
6. Corruption and Nuclear Proliferation – Matthew Bunn
7. To Bribe or to Bomb: Do Corruption and Terrorism Go Together? – Jessica C. Teets and Erica Chenoweth
8. Corruption, the Criminalized State, and Post-Soviet Transitions – Robert Legvold
9. Combating Corruption in Traditional Societies: Papua New Guinea – Sarah Dix and Emmanuel Pok
10. The Travails of Nigeria’s Anti-Corruption Crusade – Rotimi T. Suberu
11. The Paradoxes of Popular Participation in Corruption in Nigeria – Daniel Jordan Smith
12. Corruption and Human Rights: Exploring the Connection – Lucy Koechlin and Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona
13. Leadership Alters Corrupt Behavior – Robert I. Rotberg
14. The Role of the Multi-National Corporation in the Long War against Corruption – Ben W. Heineman, Jr.
15. The Organization of Anti-Corruption: Getting Incentives Right – Johann Graf Lambsdorff
16. A Coalition to Combat Corruption: TI, EITI, and Civil Society – Peter Eigen
17. Reducing Corruption in the Health and Education Sectors – Charles C. Griffin
18. Good Governance, Anti-Corruption, and Economic Development – Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Israel’s Military Option

Giora Eiland
Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Washington Quarterly, January 2010

(Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Giora Eiland is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, and was the head of the Israeli National Security Council from 2004 to 2006. He can be reached at giora_eiland@yahoo.com.)

Israel’s Military Option

Washington finally made the offer Tehran has been waiting to hear since 2006: to negotiate a peaceful halt to Iran’s nuclear program without any preconditions. In 2006, Iran was willing to temporarily freeze uranium enrichment for direct negotiation with the United States, since negotiations would have awarded the regime a great deal of legitimacy. Two years prior to that, in 2004, Iran had not dared to enrich uranium and had shelved its military plan. Today, the opening conditions are different. Washington courts Tehran while Iran declares its readiness to talk about any important strategic topic with the United States separately and with the P5 +1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council-China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States-and Germany). Nevertheless, it does not consider “its natural right to develop nuclear energy” a topic worthy of discussion and certainly is not ready to freeze any activity during the talks.

How the US Funds the Taliban

By Aram Roston
The Nation, 11/11/09

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Defending the Arsenal

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe
By Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 16/11/09

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: State

“The tribes consider the king rather differently to the Tajiks, the latter vesting the king with many powers, whereas for the tribes he has limited prerogatives; the tribes are largely selfgoverning.” (Elphinstone 1815)

State and nation

A nation is, wrote Benedict Anderson (1991), ‘an imagined political community’. Although the state exists as a political entity with recognized territory and institutions of governance, the nation exists in people’s heads and provides a sense of belonging. Nationalism, the sense of attachment to a nation, has often been a driving force for state formation; a force that in recent times has had so many negative associations that it is hard to remember it was once viewed positively.

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: One size fits all-Afghanistan in the new world order

Reasons for war

A pickup bearing formless, faceless women drives into the stadium. They get out and walk to their execution. The crowd looks on. Overlaying all is heavy music, heralding death.

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: Ideology and difference

“In Afghan history the communists had an ideology and the Taliban had an ideology, they were fighting for something they believed in. It is good to believe, to have an aim. You didn’t see that with the mujahideen, or even now. In the communist time the people in key positions had just a few possessions, they didn’t want to misuse government property, or to have bribes. It was the same at the beginning with the Taliban. Now, the government does not have a strategy, an ideology, a goal. This is a disaster. Where is the sense of value, the spirit of building a country, the honour?” (Exgovernment employee, now NGO worker, Kabul, 2003)

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: Foreword

Afghanistan is not a wellunderstood country. This is something of a paradox, for a great deal of impressive scholarly work has been devoted to the analysis of its politics, economy and society, and events such as the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and the US overthrow of the Taliban in October-November 2001 earned it a prominent place in the headlines. Yet, all too often, Afghanistan is popularly depicted in terms of crude stereotypes-hirsute warriors, wildeyed religious extremists, women consigned to the margins of social life. The complex realities of this exceptionally diverse territory have somehow not connected with its wider image. The course of events since September 11, 2001 has not greatly improved the situation. Now a different set of misleading images has been injected into the public realm, images which paint Afghanistan as an American success story, a threshold democracy, and a model of what the Bush administration’s approach to ‘nationbuilding’ can achieve. Ordinary people comparing these images have every reason to feel thoroughly confused.

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: Preface

The idea for this book first emerged in August 2001 when we realized that between us we had lived in Afghanistan and witnessed the history of international engagement here since 1989-an experience that seemed worth reflecting upon. Events since September 2001 have served to make the subject matter even more important, and of more global relevance.

Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace: Contents

Contents

Preface

Foreword

1. The mirage of peace
Illusions of peace
‘Liberation’
Raising the stakes
Bombing in a peace
Losing hearts and minds
New beginnings?
‘Failure is not an option’

2. Identity and society
New values and old
Rooted in Islam
Identity and others
Civil society?
Making decisions, being represented
War and social change
Ethnicity
Closing ranks
Managing the world beyond
Dreaming a past

3. Ideology and difference
Confronting the Taliban
The UN and the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan
An alien way of looking at the world
Could it have been different?
The legacy of confrontation

4. One size fits all-Afghanistan in the new world order
Reasons for war
Early courtship
Changing attitudes
Isolating the Taliban
Aid, rights and the US project
Stitching up a country
Human rights
NGOs-wanting it both ways
Failing the Afghans

5. The makings of a narco state?
Seeding recovery
Or corrupting the state?
Transitional attitudes
Agency responses
Double standards-or caught in a bind?

6. State
State and nation
A short history
The Taliban state
Aid and the state
The UN and the failed state model
The legacy of centralization

7. Bonn and beyond, part I: the political transition
Inauspicious beginnings
Imagining a state
The political transition
Building state failure
Enduring security?

8. Bonn and beyond, part II: the governance transition
The state: who is in control?
International failure
Letting the Afghans down

9. Concluding thoughts
Who’s who
Parties
An Afghan chronology
Further reading
References
Index