Syria: Turkey and the Syrian Kurds aim for the Islamic State's capital, Raqqa

Obama's support for the Saudi Arabian genocide in Yemen is nicely balanced by his support for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG.

Syrian Kurds are the only democratic ,non-sectarian, feminist organized group in the Middle East and deserve full-throated support from all nations, including Germany, France,  Great Britain, Russia, and China.

None should not be shy about throwing their support behind he YPG, challenging Erdoğan and his Turkish dictatorship, as Obama is doing.  (The Gulf Cooperation Council will also be challenged, as it should be.)

Here's hoping Obama succeeds in Syria and manages to humanize Saudi Arabia as he appears to be slowly trying to do.  To slowly for my taste.


The Washington Post article is clear  and helpful in understanding Syria and its future.  Highly recommended

THE WASHINGTON POST

‘We’re not in perfect control’: U.S. plans operation against Islamic State in Syria despite obstacles

A member of Syrian Democratic Forces surveys the town of Manbij, Syria, on Sept. 25. After pushing the Islamic State out of Manbij in August, the U.S.-backed group will turn its attention to nearby Raqqa. (Ayham Al-Mohammad/AFP/Getty Images)

By Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung October 31 at 7:48 PM 

The Obama administration is racing to settle questions that could scuttle a planned offensive against the Islamic State in the Syrian city of Raqqa that Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has said will begin “within weeks . . . and not many weeks.”

Senior administration officials have attributed the newly described urgency to Raqqa’s symbolic role as the “capital of the caliphate” claimed by the militants and intelligence indicating that it is the center of Islamic State planning for terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

[With the battle for Mosul underway, U.S. sets sights on Raqqa]

But the officials acknowledged a wealth of problems that could derail the offensive, including the need to gather and train additional Syrian forces. More ominously, they cite the explosive dynamics between two allies: Turkey and Syrian Kurdish fighters, who form the bulk of the existing offensive force.

“This is one of the situations in which we have contacts and influence over all the actors. But we’re not in perfect control,” said one of several officials who discussed the operation on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about its planning and potential pitfalls.

The uneasy mix of forces battling the Islamic State VIEW GRAPHIC 

President Obama approved the Raqqa plan in meetings with top national security aides in early October. But concerns about unresolved problems have put off initial hopes that the offensive could take place simultaneously with a major operation to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul that began two weeks ago.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the U.S. commander of the anti-Islamic State coalition, described the current Raqqa plan as “overlapping” the Mosul offensive. “We want to pressure Raqqa” so that militants escaping Mosul do not “have a convenient place to go,” Townsend said last week, after Carter’s description of the timing during a news conference at NATO.

The Pentagon, at least temporarily, has withdrawn a controversial request to provide direct arms shipments to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG, which forms the bulk of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces slated to undertake the Raqqa offensive. Consideration of the weapons was deferred, officials said, because initial plans to encircle the city by taking control of surrounding villages and access routes would not require additional weaponry and because conflicts with Turkey remain unresolved.

Turkey, a NATO ally and part of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, considers the YPG a terrorist force, allied with Turkey’s own Kurdish separatist movement. Its concern has grown as the Syrian Kurds, with strong U.S. backing, have taken control of much of the Syria-Turkey border from the militants.

In August, after the YPG-

dominated Syrian Democratic Forces pushed the Islamic State from the city of Manbij, northwest of Raqqa, Turkey struck back with a cross-border air and ground offensive against the Kurds.

Since then, Turkish troops and a force of about 1,000 Arab fighters from the separate Free Syrian Army have occupied a 15-mile-deep stretch along the border inside Syria. The Turkish goal is to create a 5,000-square-mile area free of the Islamic State and the Kurds, including the northwestern cities of al-Bab, Azaz and Jarabulus, U.S. officials said.

In a statement Thursday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that once his forces take Islamic State-held al-Bab, the plan is to move onward to Raqqa.

Erdogan said Thursday that he had urged Obama in a telephone call the night before not to involve the YPG in a Raqqa offensive. “We shared our plans with him,” Erdogan said in public remarks. “We said, ‘Come, let’s kick Daesh out of Raqqa together.’ ” Daesh and ISIL are alternate terms for the Islamic State.

Administration officials described the call differently. Obama, they said, told Erdogan in no uncertain terms that the decision had been made to launch the initial phase of the offensive to isolate Raqqa, using the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as the only force capable of succeeding. The United States would work to control the Kurds, but Turkey needed to support the coalition-backed operation or stay out of the way.

[Erdogan reasserts Turkey’s role in wars in Syria and Iraq]

Townsend emphasized the same point in a Thursday news conference. Turkey’s fight against the Kurdish forces, he said, was “not helpful for the coalition. And we ask members of the coalition to refrain from undertaking activities that are not focused on the defeat of Daesh.”

As far as Turkey joining the Raqqa offensive, Townsend said, “We’ll welcome any contributing nation that wants to make themselves part of the coalition.” But, he said, “that can’t just come with a whole bunch of strings. They’ve got to be willing to do what the coalition needs done.”

“The threat to the Raqqa campaign is less that [Turkish-backed forces] . . . race to Raqqa ahead of the SDF,” a senior official said. “What could derail it is if there’s a huge dust-up between Arabs and Kurds . . . potentially around al-Bab that creates a huge sucking sound” and drains both fighters and focus from the Raqqa offensive.

To further complicate the situation, the potential explosion in and around al-Bab is within shooting distance of Aleppo, where Syria’s civil war is raging between rebels and government forces and their Russian and Iranian allies. “A lot of forces could collide,” the official said.

[Little consensus within administration on how to stop fall of Aleppo to Assad]  (Worth scanning.)

The operation to encircle Raqqa is expected to take about a month, the official said. “The next phase is tightening the noose,” and then “you’ll see thousands of people moving south” toward the city.

Officials said the SDF numbers about 50,000 fighters, mostly Kurds but including about 10,000 Arabs, Turkmens and Christians.

Planners anticipate that as many as 10,000 militants may be massed inside Raqqa by then, requiring an offensive force at least that big. At that point, officials said, the request to arm the SDF — including with antitank weapons and earthmoving equipment to break militant defenses — is likely to be back on the table.

A small force of U.S. Special Operations personnel has been operating alongside the Kurdish-led force for months and has assessed it to be sufficient for an assault on Raqqa. The hands-on U.S. support, the official said, “helps us keep them focused.”

Military officials also appear confident that coalition air and artillery attacks will give that relatively small force a decisive edge against the militants.

Turkey is not alone in expressing concerns, however.

Jennifer Cafarella, a scholar at the Institute for the Study of War, said the United States would need a relatively larger, more effective partner in Raqqa than it has in Mosul — where the coalition is aiding a massive Iraqi military force — because its support capacity is much smaller in Syria.

Others have also questioned whether U.S. reliance on Kurdish-dominated forces to liberate an ethnically Arab city could create new conflicts and play into jihadist propaganda.

A key element of the U.S. plan is the expectation that Kurdish forces would spearhead the early stages of the operation, capturing and holding towns around Raqqa, and other SDF fighters would lead the assault into the Arab city to avoid inflaming the ethnic tensions that have characterized recent Kurdish advances.

But similar plans have run into difficulties elsewhere, including in Manbij, where Kurdish forces remained — despite U.S. promises that they would leave once the city was captured — and then began to head north toward the Turkish border.

The prospect of expanded weaponry could provide a powerful incentive for the YPG to move toward Raqqa, even as it pursues its larger goal of securing greater territory and political power across Syria. U.S. officials have warned the Kurds that they won’t get continued military assistance if they act against American interests by confronting the Turks.

Nasir Haj Mansour, an adviser to the SDF leadership, said Kurdish priorities could be reconciled with the American objective of retaking Raqqa. YPG forces will take part in the operation, he said, “but the level and the nature of the involvement hasn’t been defined yet.”

Although there are far fewer civilians in Raqqa than the estimated 1.5 million in Mosul, concerns have also been voiced about planning for what happens there after the Islamic State is ejected.

“There’s a choice here that the American administration has to make, between doing this expeditiously and doing this right, in a way that is sustainable,” said Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Adam Entous in Washington and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Worth a read:

It is now way past time that the United States withdraws its opposition to the IP Pipeline from Iran to Pakistan and India.  We are creating enemies for no gain.  We could be creating friends.

And we quibble over fixing crumbling bridges.

  the nation

China on road to economic turnaround

August 17, 2016

Shahbaz Bhatti - The perception that strength of a state can be gauged with the volume of its military might has become part of the past in the present world.

The economic stability has dominantly replaced this thousands of years of notion.

The more a state has economic stability the more it is strong.

China has emerged as a leading potential state who puts economic stability as the top priority for national strength.

China though surfaced as a state on the world horizon in 1949, a very little age, yet it soon after inception made economic stability as a yardstick to make the world powers realize

its undeniable presence as a nation.

Passing through a trail of achievements in diversified fields from strong national defence, information technology, construction, science and technology, education, medicine, etc.

to the present times, China has come up with an ambitious plan of economic revolution with the revival of Silk Road Economic Belt.

Purpose of this unparallel initiative is to economically rope in all states in major parts of the world particularly Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, Middle East, Africa and Turkey (the only gateway to Europe), Italy, Netherlands, Germany and Russia.

Drafted in 2013 by the Chinese President Xi Pinging, the Silk Road Economic Belt was aimed to revive the sleeping borders of China along the old Silk Route to connect the states in four continents of Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe.

The coverage area of this mega initiative is Asia and Europe encompassing about 60 countries with an anticipated cumulative investment of $4 trillion or $8 trillion.

Under the project, the Chinese government has planned to vigorously develop land, air and sea routes by constructing railways as well as roads networks, new airports and sea ports in these countries.

Through sea routes like South China Sea, South Pacific Ocean and Indian Sea, China is going to connect the states that come along these water channels with the aim of investing and fostering collaboration in Southeast Asia, Oceania and North Africa.

The CPEC enjoys a pivotal position in the overall Silk Road Economic Belt.

The project starts from Chinese border to Pakistan’s sea waters using the existing Karakoram Highway and constructing a roads network connecting almost big trade zones of the country.

The infrastructure under the CPEC comprises projects of Gwadar port, roadways, railways, energy sector projects particularly renewable energy operations, science & technology, oil and gas pipelines as well as projects financing.

Initial estimates suggest that once completed, the CPEC would connect China to Asia, Middle East and rest of the western states with Pakistan being the main beneficiary.

Considered as the game changer in the region due to the Pakistan’s geographical location in South Asia and its decades old time-tested friendship with China, CPEC is destined to play as the main trade artery of the ‘Belt and Road’ project.

Similarly, Gwadar deep sea port, being the front gate to Middle East and Europe, is set to be equipped with the international trade and shipping facilities.

The port will develop multi-layer operational mechanisms to accommodate high class ships carrying upto 18,000 containers, transport 500 million cubic feet liquefied gas to Nawabshah through 711-kilometer long pipeline which would be part of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline.

The Chinese leadership specifically is according high importance to the CPEC as Pakistan is the core of its vision about peaceful economic revolution across the world.

Currently, the Chinese leadership is aggressively engaged in holding high profile meetings with the leaderships from across the world and summit level dialogues to enter billions of dollars trade and other agreements.

They term it a win-win situation for China and the states of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe as it would trigger their economic activities, promote industries, create job markets and improve living standards of the people of these states.

The Chinese leadership believes in peaceful world economic revolution having no aggressive policies against any state across the world.

As part of this vision, the Chinese government in close collaboration with the provincial governments is exploiting all available options like holding of international trade expos, trade as well as cultural fairs, regional conferences, high profile seminars and increased government to government contacts.

Even many states especially from Central Asia have evinced interest to get connected with the CPEC to grab huge trade benefits out of the China’s international trade strategy.

More recently, the Beijing government in collaboration with the Yunnan provincial government has held the 6th China-South Asia Expo and the 24th Kunming Import and Export Fair in Kunming, the spring city of Yunnan province.

Multi-national companies, giant organizations and business groups from over 80 countries including Pakistan participated in this international event.

The Chinese government is using such events as potent tools to trigger economic activities not only for its own people but also all regional states and their over three billion population that constitute about 43 per cent of the whole world.

From Pakistan, over 200 individuals, business groups and government departments established their stalls of various products ranging from leather garments, traditional wooden furniture, textiles, marble, gyms, embroidery, etc.

China, by embarking on the Silk Road Economic Belt, has unfolded its mega but peaceful ambitions of economic progress engaging with the other regional states.

However, other economic powers of the other world bloc see this China-led economic paradigm change as a direct threat to their economic monopolies.

At this stage, Pakistan fortunately enjoys a pivotal geographical position in the region as it can play as an economic bridge between China and rest of the states particularly in Central Asia and Middle East.

The leaderships of both China and Pakistan are on the same page in terms of making economic progress.

Success lies only in turning this opportunity into economic turnaround.

China's dwindling control of North Korea; UN lack of control of China

Do you have better analysis of North Korea and its nuclear ambitions?  Of likely Chinese responses?

Would you like for the US to bomb North Korea? Do you think bombing would be effective?  If you do, wold you take responsibility for anticipated responses?  Have you an estimate of what those responses would be?

The New York Times

SIA PACIFIC | NEWS ANALYSIS

China Struggles for Balance in Response to North Korea’s Boldness

By JANE PERLEZ and CHOE SANG-HUNFEB. 7, 2016

Photo

The Chinese diplomat Wu Dawei, center, with Pak Song Il, right, of the North Korean Foreign Ministry, after arriving at Pyongyang Airport last week. 

BEIJING — When the veteran Chinese diplomat Wu Dawei left for North Korea last week, he probably knew he had been dispatched on mission impossible: to persuade the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, to climb down from his threat to launch a rocket as part of his quest to develop ballistic missile technologies.

Not only did Mr. Kim ignore China’s entreaties, sending Mr. Wu home empty-handed. He did so emphatically, ordering the launch a day earlier than expected so that it fell on one of China’s most important holidays, the eve of the Lunar New Year.

It is unclear how long President Xi Jinping of China will tolerate what some analysts here are calling the humiliation of his country at the hands of a capricious Mr. Kim. But there are no immediate signs that Beijing will radically change course and turn away from its traditional ally.Continue reading the main storyRELATED 

It’s a bad result, it’s a humiliation,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University. “I think Kim Jong-un made many mistakes, and this is one of his major mistakes.” Even so, he added, “It’s hard to say what different approach China will take.”

North Korea said Sunday that the rocket had successfully put a satellite into orbit.South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said the launch indicated that North Korea had made some technological advances toward its assumed goal of pursuing an intercontinental ballistic missile. The satellite launched Sunday weighed 440 pounds, twice as heavy as a satellite launched in 2012, according to lawmakers who attended a closed briefing by the spy agency on Sunday.

The United Nations Security Council, at an emergency meeting Sunday requested by the United States andJapan, issued a statement signaling its intention to stiffen penalties against North Korea, but without saying how or when. A draft Security Council resolution is under negotiation, diplomats said. The key is what China will allow in terms of tightening or broadening sanctions.

Hours after the launch, the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed “regret” and counseled calm and cautious action, a tone that drew immediate ridicule from users of the Chinese social media site, Weibo.

In contrast to calls from South Korea, Japan and the United States on Sunday for tougher sanctions against North Korea, China said early dialogue — meaning the resumption of talks among major powers and North Korea — was its preferred way to rein in Mr. Kim. Those negotiations, led by China and known as the six-party talks, fell apart in 2009 after North Korea walked out.

In response to the Foreign Ministry’s statement, one person on Weibo said: “I feel ‘regret’ for the Foreign Ministry.”

Another user said: “I have been racking my head but I simply can’t figure out why we have to offend everybody in the world to defend a rogue regime.”

Popular sentiment in China, where Mr. Kim has been maligned online as overweight, bumptious and inexperienced, appears to run against the government’s public patience with the North Korean leader. 

In a poll on Weibo conducted Friday and Saturday, two-thirds of the 8,000 respondents said they supported a strike by the United States to destroy North Korea’s nuclear weaponsprogram. Eighteen percent of those interviewed said they were against such a strike, and 16 percent said they were neutral.

In a telling signal of official disapproval of the results, Chinese censors had deleted the poll by Sunday afternoon.

Continue reading the main story

Despite its frustration with Mr. Kim and frosty personal relations — Mr. Xi has refused to meet with Mr. Kim — China will probably continue to put up with his behavior, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University.

China is afraid of turning its recalcitrant ally into a worrisome enemy, he said.

The government has opposed severe sanctions aimed at curtailing the amount of oil that China exports to North Korea and at stopping imports of mineral resources. So far, China has supported only sanctions that limit the transfer or sale of military equipment or other items that would help North Korea’s weapons program.

“China thinks more severe sanctions will reduce China’s influence in North Korea,” Mr. Shi said.

Most important, China was afraid that hammering North Korea with heavy sanctions would turn it into a hostile country that could “take action” against Beijing, Mr. Shi said.

Mr. Xi has made the calculation that Mr. Kim, the third generation of the Kim family to rule North Korea, would be an enduring figure, and he sent Liu Yunshan, a member of the powerful Standing Committee of the Communist Party, to a military parade in Pyongyang last October to make a kind of rapprochement, Mr. Shi said.

China even appeared to be willing to risk its budding relationship with South Korea, an ally of the United States, by putting up with North Korea’s bad behavior.

The rocket launch on Sunday, which came after a fourth nuclear test by the North Koreans in early January, showed that China’s goal of maintaining good relationships with both North Korea and South Korea was an extremely difficult balancing act, Mr. Cheng said.

Mr. Xi has gone out of his way to court the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, by stressing the strong economic relationship between the two countries. China is South Korea’s biggest trading partner, and Ms. Park raised eyebrows among Washington officials last September by turning up at a huge military parade on Tiananmen Square in Beijing that was boycotted by Western leaders.

Photo

Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and President Xi Jinping of China during their meeting in Beijing in January. 

CreditIn a move sure to displease China, South Korea’s Defense Department said hours after the launch Sunday that it would start formal discussions with the United States about the deployment of a missile defense system known as Thaad, for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense.

China has vigorously opposed the deployment of the system, arguing that it would be used by the United States to interfere with China’s defenses and as a tool to contain China.

The North Korean rocket launch “is aimed at advancing its nuclear weaponsand their delivery missiles,” Ms. Park said. “North Korea poses a grave challenge to the peace of Northeast Asia and the rest of the world by rejecting dialogue and persisting in advancing its missiles for the sake of regime survival.” 

Maj. Gen. Kim Yong-hyun, the head of operations at the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said that Seoul and Washington had agreed that their annual joint springtime military exercises, code-named Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, would be the largest ever this year.

He said that South Korea would deploy more propaganda loudspeakers along the border with North Korea and operate them for longer hours. South Korea switched on the long-dormant loudspeakers after the January nuclear test, and North Korea responded by sending balloons into the South to drop propaganda leaflets and trash.

In recent years, South Korea has aggressively courted closer ties with China, hoping it would help tame North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The mood shifted in South Korea, however, after the nuclear test in January. China, North Korea’s only major trading partner, rejected repeated South Korean and American demands that it force the North to give up its nuclear-missile program by squeezing oil and other shipments.

President Obama and Mr. Xi spoke by telephone last week about the need for unified action regarding sanctions at the United Nations, the White House said.

But the agreement between the two leaders in California in 2013, when cooperation on finding a solution to the North Korea dilemma was the high point of their meeting, appears to have evaporated.

When Secretary of State John Kerry held more than four hours of talks with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, last month in Beijing, there was little enthusiasm for more targeted sanctions by the Chinese, even though both sides knew that a rocket launch was likely to happen, American officials said.

“The general relationship between the United States and China is far from good, and I don’t think the U.S. has any real bargaining chips with China over North Korea,” Mr. Shi said. “The vital interest of the United States is to reduce the nuclear weapons, and the vital interest of China is to keep a minimum degree of stability and to keep North Korea a friend.”

Under various Security Council resolutions, North Korea is banned from rocket launches using ballistic missile technology. But it has touted its missiles and nuclear weapons as the “sacred sword” its people have long sought to deter American invasions. On Sunday, it called the satellite “a gift of most intense loyalty” for Mr. Kim.

Bad news for Sunni jihadists; good news for the World

From the article:

In an effort to buttress the Iraqi military’s abilities, the Obama administration has sought congressional approval to lease and eventually sell Apache helicopter gunships. But some lawmakers have been hesitant, fearing that they might be used by al-Maliki to intimidate political opponents. [Emphasis added.]

No doubt the same Senators who want greater sanctions against Iran, just as the US is negating a peace treaty with Iran and Russia and China and France and England and Germany.  Those Senators like Sunni extremists.  I wonder why.  Are the Senators ideologically committed to Sunni jihadists, or are they paid for a commitment?  Or both?  In any case they are not a credit to America.

allie durell douthit

3423 francis street

808/675-8750

ddouthit@mac.com

შეიძლება თქვენ ფეხით სილამაზე. 

Dallas Morning News, by way of The New York Times

Karim kadim/The Associated Press

A man stood guard while women walked through the site of a bombing in a Christian section of Baghdad on Wednesday.

Published: 25 December 2013 10:56 PM

Updated: 25 December 2013 11:00 PM

U.S. sends arms to help Iraqis fight extremists

WASHINGTON — The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by an al-Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria. 

The move follows an appeal for help in battling the extremist group by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who met with President Barack Obama in Washington last month. 

But some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that has already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, Iraq’s highest level of violence since 2008. 

Al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, has become a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Riding in armed convoys, the group has intimidated towns, assassinated local officials and, in an episode last week, used suicide bombers and hidden explosives to kill the commander of the Iraqi army’s 7th Division and more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers as they raided an al-Qaeda training camp near Rutbah. 

Bombings in Christian areas of Baghdad on Christmas Day, which killed more than three dozen people, also bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation. 

The surge in violence stands in contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path, despite the failure of U.S. and Iraqi officials in 2011 to negotiate an agreement for a limited number of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq. 

Iraq’s foreign minister has floated the idea of having U.S.-operated, armed Predator or Reaper drones respond to the expanding militant network. But al-Maliki, who is positioning himself to run for a third term as prime minister and who is sensitive to nationalist sentiment at home, has not formally requested such intervention. 

The idea of carrying out such drone attacks, which might prompt the question of whether the Obama administration has succeeded in bringing the Iraq war to what the president has called a “responsible end,” also appears to have no support in the White House. 

“We have not received a formal request for U.S.-operated armed drones operating over Iraq, nor are we planning to divert armed ISR over Iraq,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. 

For now, the new lethal aid from the United States includes a shipment of 75 Hellfire missiles, which were delivered to Iraq last week. The weapons are strapped beneath the wings of small Cessna turboprop planes and fired at militant camps, with the CIA providing targeting assistance. 

In addition, 10 ScanEagle reconnaissance drones are expected to be delivered to Iraq by March. They are smaller cousins of the larger, more capable Predators that used to fly over Iraq.
U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say they have effectively mapped the locations and origins of the al-Qaeda network in Iraq and are sharing this information with the Iraqis.
Administration officials said the aid was significant because the Iraqis had virtually run out of Hellfire missiles. The Iraqi military, with no air force to speak of and limited reconnaissance of its own, has a very limited ability to locate and quickly strike al-Qaeda militants. The combination of U.S.-supplied Hellfire missiles, tactical drones and intelligence is intended to augment that limited Iraqi ability. 

The Obama administration has also given three Aerostat balloons to the Iraqi government and has provided three additional reconnaissance helicopters to the Iraqi military. The United States also is planning to send 48 Raven reconnaissance drones before the end of 2014 and to deliver next fall the first of the F-16 fighters Iraq has bought. 

But the lack of armed drones, some experts say, will hamper efforts to dismantle the al-Qaeda threat in Iraq over the coming weeks and months. 

“Giving them some ScanEagle drones is great,” said Michael Knights, an expert on Iraqi security at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But is it really going to make much difference? Their range is tiny. 

“The real requirement today is for a long-range, high endurance armed drone capability,” added Knights, who frequently travels to Iraq. “There is one place in the world where al-Qaeda can run a major affiliate without fear of a U.S. drone or air attack, and that is in Iraq and Syria.” 

In an effort to buttress the Iraqi military’s abilities, the Obama administration has sought congressional approval to lease and eventually sell Apache helicopter gunships. But some lawmakers have been hesitant, fearing that they might be used by al-Maliki to intimidate political opponents. 

Using extortion and playing on Sunni grievances against al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government, the al-Qaeda affiliate is largely self-financing. One Iraqi politician, who asked not to be named to avoid retaliation, said al-Qaeda militants had even begun to extort money from shopkeepers in Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital. 

A number of factors are helping the al-Qaeda affiliate. The terrorist group took advantage of the departure of U.S. forces to rebuild its operations in Iraq and to push into Syria. Now that it has established a strong foothold in Syria, it is in turn using its base there to send suicide bombers into Iraq at a rate of 30 to 40 a month, using them against Shiites but also against Sunnis who are reluctant to cede control. 

Michael R. Gordon
and Eric Schmitt,
The New York Times

Images from Google Images:

A tradition of treating captives humanly has not, unfortunately, 

taken root in the Middle East. 

Nor in America, sadly.

Conflict in the East China Sea; and a recommended movie

The Times article below tells of potential conflict between China, Japan, and South Korea in the East China Sea.  I won't try to summarize the Times article.

Here are maps and pictures of the islands -- Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China -- in dispute, and the names of the three seas in the region.

The last map shows how extraordinarily close Japan and Korea are.  A beautiful movie, about disaffected young men in Korea an Japan and heir peculiar relationships with each other, is, in netflix streaming, named Boat.  Google has no good stills from the movie but here are posers:

The movie has Korean subtitles when he Japanese  guy is talking, and Japanese when the Korean is talking; English for both. T he guys can understand each other's language.

One can, apparently, row a boat from Korea to Japan, overnight if one is a smuggler, so close are the two countries.   And at times the East Sea or Sea of Japan is flat and tiny waves lap both coasts.  Life as we don't know it.  Highly recommended.

∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼∼

The New York Times

December 1, 2013
In the East China Sea, a Far Bigger Test of Power LoomsBy DAVID E. SANGERWASHINGTON — In an era when the Obama administration has been focused on new forms of conflict — as countries use cyberweapons and drones to extend their power — the dangerous contest suddenly erupting over a pile of rocks in the East China Sea seems almost a throwback to the Cold War.
Suddenly, naval assets and air patrols are the currency of a shadow conflict between Washington and Beijing that the Obama administration increasingly fears could escalate and that American officials have said could derail their complex plan to manage China’s rise without overtly trying to contain it. As in the Cold War, the immediate territorial dispute seems to be an excuse for a far larger question of who will exercise influence over a vast region.
The result is that, as the Chinese grow more determined to assert their territorial claimsover a string of islands once important mainly to fishermen, America’s allies are also pouring military assets into the region — potentially escalating the once obscure dispute into a broader test of power in the Pacific.
Now a maritime outpost that had modest strategic significance is taking on enormous symbolic import. South Korea, which has broader concerns about China’s regional power, is building a new naval base for 20 warships, including submarines, arguing that it has to protect vital shipping lanes in the East China Sea for its exports — including many electronics headed to China.
The Japanese, after largely depending on American bases on Okinawa to back up their own limited patrols in the area, plan to build a new army base by 2016 on a small, inhabited island near the disputed islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
The Japanese are also planning to deploy more F-15s and radar planes to Okinawa and a new helicopter carrier, and, for the first time, have considered buying unarmed American drones to patrol the area, part of a three-year-long shift in military strategy to focus on their southern islands and on China. That is part of a fundamental change in the national mind-set toward a Japan that is more willing and able to defend itself than anytime since World War II, in part because of doubts about America’s own commitment to the region.
As Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left on Sunday for a trip that will take him to the capitals of all three major contestants — Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing — the administration’s public message is that all sides need to cool down and keep nationalistic talk from making a tense situation worse.
Mr. Biden will encounter countries that are now re-examining how civilian and military officials interact: Over the past few weeks, for very separate reasons, Japan and China have each approved the creation of a national security council. For Japan, it is an effort to strengthen the hand of the prime minister in times of crises, a concept the Japanese body politic long resisted because of the legacies of World War II.
For China, it appears to be an effort by President Xi Jinping to exercise a degree of control over all sources of national power that his immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, never fully mastered. Interestingly, as China sent its aircraft carrier to another potential trouble spot, the South China Sea, its path avoided the disputed islands, perhaps a sign that the Chinese realize they may have overplayed their hand.
Still, in private, American officials say they are worried that a small incident — a collision like the one between an American intelligence plane and the Chinese air force a dozen years ago off Hainan Island — could rapidly worsen the situation.
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Tom Donilon, who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser until earlier this year and a principal architect of the administration’s approach to China, said a similar “risk of miscalculation” is what “we need to be very concerned about going forward here.” A senior administration official said Mr. Biden’s message would be that the United States will “seek crisis management mechanisms and confidence-building measures to lower tensions and reduce risk of escalation or miscalculation.”
But one of Mr. Obama’s current advisers said, “It’s pretty clear this isn’t really about the islands.” Declining to speak on the record about a sensitive strategic issue, the official added that it was about a desire by some in China, including the People’s Liberation Army and perhaps the new political leadership, “to assert themselves in ways that until recently they didn’t have the military capability to make real.”
The adviser added: “They say it’s in response to our efforts to contain them, but our analysis is that it’s really their effort to push our presence further out into the Pacific.”
In fact, on his last trip to Asia as secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates said in January 2011 that he believed the long-term goal of the Chinese was to push the United States to “the second island chain,” farther out in the Pacific, keeping American air and naval assets ever farther from the region around China’s coast. Two years later, Obama officials will not utter that view in public, but it is a running theme in American intelligence assessments about the Chinese military, tempered by evidence that some Chinese officials worry about blowback if they overreach.
That has been a repeated cycle in Mr. Obama’s relations with the Chinese. In 2010, a series of episodes, touched off by American arms sales to Taiwan and the ramming of a Japanese coast guard ship in the Senkakus by an inebriated Chinese sea captain, led China to cut off military-to-military relations between Beijing and Washington and the sale of rare-earth metals, used for electronics, to the Japanese.
Both proved temporary, and by the end of the year some senior Chinese officials, led by the state councilor, Dai Bingguo, warned that China’s actions were driving countries in the region into American hands. “Some say China wants to replace the United States and dominate the world,” Mr. Dai wrote in an article that Mr. Donilon frequently cited. “That is simply a myth.”
But Mr. Dai is gone from power, and the Obama administration is now trying to figure out how to interpret each new Chinese action under Mr. Xi, of which the recent “air defense identification zone” was considered the most calculated and, perhaps, the most muscular. Many countries claim such zones; China knew it was claiming it over disputed territory.
Mr. Obama’s immediate response was to send two unarmed B-52 bombers on what the Pentagon called “routine” runs over the territory; they were routine, but the timing and symbolism were lost on no one. Now the White House faces the more complex task of its longer-term response. To make the promise of his “Asian pivot” real, the president will have to convince Congress, and allies in the region, that he means to devote more military, diplomatic and economic attention there — not to contain China, he insists, but to preserve and extend America’s longtime role as a keeper of the peace in the Pacific.
That will be challenging at a time of Pentagon budget cuts, a national mood to focus on problems at home and a national security apparatus focused on Iran, Syria and the future of the Middle East.
Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Beijing, and Martin Fackler from Tokyo.

The US,Chevron,China,and Central Asia

Busy, busy, busy, our State Department is, to keep Iran’s natural gas bottled up.  

I wonder how the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Pipeline (TAPI), as opposed to the Iran-Pakistan Pipeline (IP Pipeline) which will also feed India and China, figures into our negotiations for Peace in Iran.  US oil interests will not be involved in the IP Pipeline; and the US promotes TAPI vigorously  and threatens Pakistan with sanctions if it fulfills ins contract with iran to construct the IP  Pipeline.     

How much weight do the oil companies' interest figure into our negotiations with Iran?  The US has done its best to block Iranian oil exports since the Islamic Republic overthrew the Sash and nationalized natural resources.  Opening the flow of oil and gas from Iran to the world  should be a major part of our negotiations with Iran over it’s suspected but not proved desire to develop the Bomb.  Is it?

Liberals did their best to discover Cheney’s conversations with energy companies when he met in secret with them as Bushco’s energy policies were developed, even applying to the federal courts for aid.  Shouldn’t Liberals make the same demands of the Obama administration?  I Shouldn't we know of conversations with oil interests about matters that concern Peace with Iran?think we should. I’m not a powerful lobbying entity, but this is a subject I will address to my congresspersons.  Will you, too?

If the report in the PakTribune, below, is accurate, why is it that a private company is able to pay 10 Billion Dollars to develop the TTAPI Pipeline, when Pakistan and India seem unable to do it themselves?  I favor modifying our tax code.  Radical Republicans claim we don't have enough money to support our poor, and an oil company has, if the report is accurate, money to burn.  Something is wrong here.  Are we concerned that oil companies will move to Dubai to avoid US taxation, as Cheney has done with his companies?  Does the UN need taxing power, just as the US developed the power to regulate powerful railroads when the individual States lacked the power?  Is the analogy good?

The TAPI pipeline is good news for the Taliban and the Balochistan Resistance Movement, since security of the pipeline is a major concern and their power to disrupt it is great.  I’m pleased with prospect of the Balochistan Resistance Movement’s possible gain in power, since the Balochi are treated unfairly by Pakistan and Iran.  I’m not pleased with the Taliban’s.

Roadblocks remain to TAPI pipeline construction - Oil & Gas Journal

Note:  Wikipedia, which frequently reports on the trustworthiness of news outlets, has no report on the PakTribune's trustworthiness, so I’m cautious about the authenticity of the report below.  Stay tuned.  I’ll see if the story is picked up by other news outlets.

US pushes Chevron's bid for TAPI pipeline project12 November, 2013

ISLAMABAD: The United States may press Pakistan to award the multi-billion-dollar contract for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India (TAPI) gas pipeline project to pipeline to US energy giant Chevron. 

"During the energy group meeting, the issue relating to awarding TAPI gas pipeline contract to Chevron will come under discussion," sources said, adding that representatives of the US State Department and Chevron had also visited India for the same purpose. 

Chevron and Exxon Mobil, renowned oil and gas companies with vast experience in the energy sector, have expressed interest to be the consortium leaders for the project, sources say. All participating countries have signed Gas Sales Purchase Agreement (GSPA) with Turkmenistan to import gas under TAPI gas pipeline project. 

Pakistan is keen to see Chevron undertake work on the pipeline and sources stress there is a strong possibility that the US energy giant will be selected as consortium leader to finance, design and build the pipeline. 

On its part, Chevron has sought exploration rights in Turkmenistan as well as contracts in response to financing and running the project. However, Turkmenistan has offered exploration rights for offshore fields and asked Chevron to swap gas found in these fields for onshore ones and export it to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India under the TAPI project. Turkmenistan does not allow foreign companies to search for hydrocarbons on onshore fields. 

The Asian Development Bank (ADB), hired as an advisor to help generate funds for the project, has already warned that the TAPI gas pipeline project cost may exceed $10 billion against earlier estimates of $7.5 billion due to delays in implementation of the project. 

The pipeline will pass through war-torn Afghanistan, which has assured Pakistan and other participating countries of providing adequate security for the pipeline. 

Under the TAPI project, Pakistan and India will get 1.365 billion cubic feet of gas per day (bcfd) each from Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan will get 0.5 bcfd. 

Turkmenistan will export natural gas through the 1,800 kilometer pipeline that will reach India after passing through Afghanistan and Pakistan.

TAPI and Turkmenistan’s Natural Gas | GeoCurrents

 Note that TAPI has no proposal for supplying gas to China, while he IP Pipeline passes right by Gwadar, the deep water port China is spending millions to develop right on the Iranian Iranian border with Pakistan.

China Strings Pearls While US Kills Terrorists | Culture of Life News

Business Recorder

巴基斯坦将瓜德尔港经营权转交中国公司-观察者网

Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline | emptywheel

Chinese workers in Gwadar

For more on the IP Pipeline, see this blog here and here.

For more on Balochistan see Mansouled Fiery Islands, here and here.