The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? “The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ‘Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics.”

Given that the trucking contracts total $2.2 billion, by my math that’s at least $220 million paid to the Taliban. As appalling as this is, it should not be a surprise. It’s been a pattern throughout the “war on terror,” and not just by the U.S.

I’d love to see someone do some real accounting on how much we’ve paid actual or potential adversaries to not attack us, but some quick numbers:

Paying the Taliban to not attack U.S. trucks carrying military supplies in Afghanistan: at least $200 million
Renaming insurgents the “Sons of Iraq” and paying them to not attack U.S. targets: $16 million a month
Getting Pakistan to stay on our side: many, many billions of dollars
Clinging to the notion that this is a “war of ideas”: Priceless

Russia Today has the video:

Here are his thoughts on hip hop: “These youngsters who work in this art in our country – they bring unique Russian charm. Street rap may be a little bit rough, but it contains social meaning – raising social problems. Graffiti becomes a real elegant art. Break dance is something special. It is really a promotion of a healthy lifestyle. It’s hard to imagine break dance being combined with alcohol or drugs. When people perform with acrobatic elements, it really calls for respect.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with any of that. And as uncomfortable and out of place as he looks here, I think we have to give him some credit for being game. Can you imagine a US president doing that?

And when you think about it, hip hop’s fixation on “respect” and exaggerating perceived slights — well, it’s actually pretty appropriate for Russia today.

There are five stories. The first is on the background of the search; the second on the two groups now searching for the grave; the third on the Genghis Khan “mausoleum” in China and his legacy there and in Russia; the fourth on the money to be made on Genghis Khan in Mongolia and the fifth on how most Mongolians don’t actually want the grave to be found.

Plus, there are lots of photos. So check it out and enjoy.

Emin Milli being escorted into court.

Two Azerbaijani political activists and bloggers were sentenced today to prison terms of two and two and a half years, respectively, in obviously trumped up charges of assault. The alleged victim of the beating by these dorky bloggers testified in court that he knew the martial art Wushu and admitted that in his official statement on the incident: “I wrote what policeman told me to write.”

Azerbaijan has a pretty atrocious record on human rights, and I experienced firsthand their thuggish and hamhanded treatment of anyone who opposes them. The more likely cause of the bloggers’ arrest? According to the New York Times, it was:

a video in which a donkey holds a news conference before a circle of gravely nodding journalists. Dressed in a voluminous gray costume, Adnan Hajizada rhapsodizes over the lush life awaiting donkeys in Azerbaijan. To his audience — cosmopolitan young Azeris following his commentaries on blogs and Facebook — the video was a sly send-up of the government, which had been accused in the local news media of paying exorbitant prices to import donkeys.

The U.S. has protested the arrest of the two men, Adnan Hajizada, 26, and Emin Milli, 30. In an August visit to Azerbaijan, one of the top U.S. diplomats in the region, Matthew Bryza (who is rumored to be the next ambassador to Azerbaijan), said “it is essential that these cases [of the jailed bloggers] be resolved according to due process” and that the state respects the fundamental rights of Azerbaijanis and “the advance of media freedom.” A US embassy spokeswoman “expressed concern about the verdicts and said the State Department would issue a formal statement later in the day.“

But countries like Azerbaijan know that statements like that are part of the game that diplomats play. Actions speak louder than words, and inaction can speak just as loud.

In October 2003, Azerbaijan had a presidential election. Human Rights Watch described “an election campaign that from the beginning was heavily manipulated by the government to favor Prime Minister Ilham Aliev, son of President Heidar Aliev. The government ensured that election commissions would be stacked to favor Aliev, and banned nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from monitoring the vote. As the election drew nearer, government officials openly sided with Ilham Aliev, obstructed opposition rallies, and sought to limit participation in them. Police have beaten and arbitrarily detained hundreds of opposition activists, including a seventy-three-year-old woman.”

Did this bother the U.S.? Not especially. According to Mark MacKinnon, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, in his book The New Cold War:

In a message to the Azeri government ahead of the elections, President Bush noted President Ilham Aliyev’s “commitment to a free and fair election” and concluded “I look forward to working with you after these elections.”

The opposition, since then, has more or less given up and in the next presidential elections, in 2008, all of the major opposition parties boycotted. This was deemed “progress” and “an improvement” by the State Department.

By contrast, in neighboring Georgia, less than a month after Azerbaijan’s 2003 elections, the U.S. got heavily involved in supporting the opposition, led by Mikhail Saakashvili, that eventually prevailed in the Rose Revolution. What was the difference? You get one guess.

Yes, you’re right: Azerbaijan has since the collapse of the Soviet Union been a fairly reliable ally of the U.S., while Georgia’s president at the time, Edvard Shevardnadze, was showing signs of being wobbly against the Russians, and Saakashvili is pretty much unrivaled among world leaders in his devotion to Washington.

According to Freedom House, since 2003 Azerbaijan has backslid on human rights, from “partly free” to “not free.” Yet Bryza says they are making progress: “Ilham Aliyev, we believe, is working to modernize the political system of Azerbaijan, to create democracy in the context of Azerbaijan’s culture and traditions — which the president said is necessary, because democracy looks different in every country. That said, they haven’t gone far enough. And we will continue to press President Aliyev — and his opposition as well — to behave constructively, to build and strengthen democratic institutions as we pursue our full range of interests.”

According to another activist who was in court for today’s proceedings, after he was sentenced Hajizada “questioned how alleged witnesses will look into the eyes of their families- we will be done with our sentences but I wonder how they are going to live a life built on lies.” People who claim the Azerbaijan government is improving might think about that, too.

A top official with Iran’s armed forces says the fall of empires begins with domestic corruption after a US Army psychiatrist treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan killed 12 soldiers in Fort Hood.

Deputy Head of Iran’s armed forces headquarters Brigadier-General Seyyed Massoud Jazayeri said Saturday that the killing in the US Army base is just a small instance of many challenges inside the US government and the American society.

According to the general, these American challenges have manifested themselves in the form of faulty human relations and family dynamics as well as political differences and other social issues.

“Basically, the reason behind the fall of empires is not corruption outside the country but from within,” General Jazayeri said .”All evidence indicates that the US society will follow [in the footsteps of the Soviet Union].”

“The US government believes that due to the country’s geographical situation, they are safe. But the reality is that ‘the major warning’ comes from within,” he added.

via ‘Fort Hood incident signals fall of US empire’.

An interesting piece of primary source history. Check it out: Video | 1989: Panelists Discuss the Impact of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Cover of Men Who Stare at Goats

When I was a reporter in the Washington bureau of Jane’s Defence Weekly, it was my job to uncover new things that the U.S. military was up to. By far the most tedious way of doing this was to comb through the FedBizOpps website, where the government publicly has to solicit pretty much everything it wants to buy. But for every sexy new missile or helicopter program you’d come across, there would be 10,000 requests for office furniture or lawnmowing services. But that one in 10,000 made it worth the time, so about once a week I got an extra cup of coffee and set to it.

One day, in 2005, I came across this solicitation, from the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C.:

88 — LIVE, MALE, CAPRINES (GOATS)

This caught my attention. I had just read The Men Who Stare at Goats, and was blown away by the incredible story of serious military research done on the paranormal, and that it was ever considered that soldiers might walk into battle holding baby lambs to pacify enemies. And that the Army had a program called “Jedi Warrior.” And, of course, as per the title of the book, that researchers experimented on how to kill goats simply by staring at them. The research was being done, the book said, by U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Ft. Bragg.

So that listing obviously rang a bell. It went on: “The US Army has a a requirement for Caprines (goats) to be delivered to Fort Bragg, NC as required during the period 1 June 2002 thru 31 May 2003 with (2) one-year option periods. The caprines must be live, male, healthy, weighing fifty (50) pounds or more.”

Curious, I called the public affairs officer at Ft Bragg, and asked what it was about. He didn’t know — and, to my surprise, hadn’t heard of the book. I also emailed the author, Jon Ronson, through his website, thinking he might find the solicitation funny. (Unfortunately all of this email traffic was on my janes account, which has been lost, so I’m paraphrasing.)

I heard back quickly from Ronson, who said “Wow — so it might be true.” Which wasn’t the response I expected to get from an author of a purportedly nonfiction book. But as True/Slant’s Dan Kois reports, the opening title of the movie, opening Friday, reads: “More of this is true than you would believe.” So the filmmakers seem to be making no claims about airtight facts.

And then, I heard back from the public affairs officer at Ft. Bragg. He had found out what they used the goats for, but asked me not to report it: They were used for ballistics testing. Apparently goat flesh is a close enough approximation to human flesh that when researchers want to figure out how a human might react to being shot in various situations, well… (This was not a secret, anyway, plenty of people have discussed it.)

The army has solicited for goats lots of times, from at least 2002 to 2006. One time, for example, the army was looking for 150 goats, and specified that “[g]oats can not be fed the night prior to delivery.” Would cut down on the mess, I imagine. But I did a search on fedbizopps now, which lets you search for solicitations back 365 days, and found that there have been no goat orders in the past year.

So: does the army have a better means of ballistics testing now? Did they get in trouble with animal rights people? Are they raising their own goats now? Anyone reading this at Ft Bragg, drop a line…

There are a lot of essays floating around these days about the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened twenty years ago this month. This is the best one I’ve read. But as Timothy Garton Ash writes in that piece, there has yet to be written a great account of how these events were experienced by ordinary people. That’s probably in part due to the fact that the changes that have taken place are so vast that they’re hard to treat authoritatively.

But this piece, which popped up on Ferghana.ru this morning, reminded me of one of the most profound changes: a sad cheapening of public culture:

Samarqand used to be one of the most “reading” cities in Uzbekistan. It is hard to believe now but in 90s each of three districts of the city had several bookstores. Samarqand’s pride was Book Center – three-storey bookstore. Today, such stores are reconditioned into food stores, drug stores and boutiques. The former Book Center now serves as the head office of biggest cellular provider.

Few days ago the book store in the area of Samarqand state university (hosting five thousand students) was shut down. Allegedly, new owners will recondition the place into restaurant.

The only active bookstore in Samarqand is Uzkitab at Alisher Navoi Street (former Mustillik and Lenin Street) that has existed since Soviet period. I remember that that in the period of total deficit (even having enough bookstores) people had to sell waste paper to the government in order to obtain classic literature. This is the way how many residents of Samarqand filled their personal libraries with books. Today, these books, which were considered rare few years ago, moved to big and small markets as well as garage sales.

I’ve gotten into a ton of arguments, during my time in the former communist world, with locals who blame the U.S. for dumping all of its crap culture, like McDonald’s and Hollywood blockbusters, on them. (To which I always respond: you’re the ones buying it.) And to be fair, some good American culture makes it to the east, as well: it was in Budapest that I fell in love with Hal Hartley films (OK, I was in college) and Serb friends who introduced me to American indie bands that are still some of my favorites. But that is pretty rare and for the most part the American culture that crosses over the ruins of the Iron Curtain, and the local pop culture it inspires, is terrible.

And I suspect that is one of the U.S.’s greatest soft power challenges, and one of the reasons why 1989 did not turn out to be the “end of history” and the victory of liberal, democratic capitalism: Because, as little as people want their government to get their friends to spy on them or to be told how much wheat to produce in the next five years, they don’t want their culture to be ruined, either.

But, as several outlets have noted, and as the YouTube video attests, some Iranians were calling on President Obama to help, in some fashion:

Another group of protesters chanted “We don’t want the atom bomb”:

My first thought was that these are provocateurs, planted by the Iranian government to discredit the opposition by making it look like the protesters were doing the U.S.’s bidding. Why would the protesters be explicitly tying themselves with the U.S. and its aims, when they’ve so scrupulously avoided doing so in the past? And to do it in such a way that echoes the George W. Bush formulation or “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists?” And when a top opposition official, in Washington just a few days earlier, told the largely American audience exactly what they didn’t want to hear, according to Jackson Diehl’s op-ed in the Washington Post, wonderfully titled “Iran’s Unlovable Opposition.”

Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program. Mohajerani, who served as culture minister in the liberal Iranian government of Mohammed Khatemi in the 1990s, distanced himself from the current president’s denial of the Holocaust and remarked at one point that Iran “should not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.”

But he went on to assert, as per the current regime, that the countries seeking to freeze Iran’s nuclear program themselves possess nuclear weapons, as does Israel; that Israel had contracted to supply nuclear weapons to Iran’s former shah; and that Ahmadinejad’s threats to destroy Israel were no different than what Hillary Clinton had said about Iran during her presidential campaign. Asked whether Israel had a right to exist, he refused to respond.

So why would Iranians, on today of all days, say that Obama should help them? The folks at Tehran Bureau, the go-to site for English-language info on the opposition, are plugging the Obama video, so they think it’s legit, and I’m inclined to believe them.

So what gives? Any thoughts?

Taliban fighters surrender in Herat, Afghanistan on October 14, 2009 (Majid/Getty)

From the Times of India. Intriguing:

The Taliban are no political neophytes. In a shrewd political move, the Taliban sent a letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Beijing on Wednesday to ask the regional body to intervene and solve the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.

The letter… is an attempt to exploit the differences between the China-Russia-CIS combine against the United States, highlighting the general perception that the SCO is intended to keep the US out of the Central Asian region.

In the open letter, which was publicised by the Chinese official media on Thursday, the Taliban said, “We call on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to assist countries in the region against colonialists and adopt a strong stance against the occupation of Afghanistan”.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a regional body, led by Russia and China but including Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, plus observers Iran, Mongolia, India and Pakistan. In its early days it seemed to have ambitions of becoming a sort of eastern anti-NATO, but its military ambitions have cooled and it has now settled into a sort of irrelevance that took NATO decades to achieve.

But this move by the Taliban is certainly interesting. I’m not sure it’s as savvy as this article makes it out to be, though. As much as China and Russia might want to thwart U.S. influence in their neighborhood, I’m not sure that backing the Taliban is the way they want to do that. Russia, obviously, has a bit of difficult history with Islamists in Afghanistan, and China fears that the Muslim Uighurs are using Afghanistan as a rear base to get Taliban support for attacks on China.

And so both countries are cooperating, in discreet ways, with the U.S. war there. Russia is allowing transport of U.S. military goods through its territory en route to Afghanistan, and China is talking to the U.S. about coordinating its mining activities in eastern Afghanistan with the U.S., possibly with the aim of getting U.S. security for its workers in exchange for help with U.S. development efforts.

So it looks like the Taliban are probably barking up the wrong tree. And doesn’t it seem strange that they are asking for a Russia-led organization to “adopt a strong stance against the occupation of Afghanistan?” Readers with a greater understanding of the Taliban’s foreign policy, please weigh in.

via Taliban’s political ace: A letter to Shanghai group – Pakistan – World – The Times of India.