Why does Palin need a cheat sheet (on her hand) to remember to “lift America’s spirits”?

“The deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan.” So began a Feb 4th piece by Jane Perlez in the New York Times.

But even all these days on, it’s been a very discreet unveiling.

Lest we forget, US servicepeople are not supposed to be dying in Pakistan. It’s not Iraq, it’s not Afghanistan. There’s no agreement for combat troops to operate. Until recently, U.S. officials have repeatedly officially denied having any combat troops in place. This month’s killing exposed that lie — so what were the US troops doing there?

What we’ve learned so far is the soldiers were part of what federal officials say is a small contingent of American soldiers who’ve been training Pakistan’s army for 18 months now.

As the Times puts it, “the trainings has been acknowledged only gingerly by both the Americans and the Pakistanis…..so as not to trespass onto Pakistani sensitivities about sovereignty and not to further inflame high anti-American sentiment.”

For a taste of that gingerly-acknowledging, read the Times story. In more than 1, 000 words Perlez quotes roughly a dozen sources, all but two of them US officials, or Pakistanis working implicitly or explicitly with the US embassy. Of two non-official sources, one makes the obvious point:

The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,” Professor Hussain said.

It’s an obvious point because the Pakistani press and local activists have been making it loudly, n the press and in street protests for months now. In the same week that Perlez’s piece appeared, the country’s English daily, The News, ran a long editorial on the rapid increase in US drone attacks, making the point that roughly 41 civilians have been killed for every alleged Al Qaeda or Taliban target.

The Taliban’s rewarding its fighters with new cars when they bring down US drones — “The shooting down of the drone has lifted the morale of our fighters. It’s a huge success for the poorly armed Taliban against a powerful enemy,” remarked a senior Taliban commander, at the car-award ceremony.

Among the Pakistani public, surveys constantly show that Pakistanis consider the US a greater threat than the Taliban, despite 3,021 Pakistani deaths in terrorist attacks last year. If the drones are controversial, the presence of US soldiers on Pakistani soil is far more so.
If the US war is quietly shifting, it’s not quiet inside Pakistan. People are kicking up a stink. Yet Perlez’s piece, which is bylined Islamabad, reads more like an Embassy hand-out than a Pulitzer Prize-winner’s research. Times readers get only the barest whiff of local reaction, and that may be the most dangerous strike yet.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

Written by Ramona Vijeyarasa for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been torn by violent conflicts since its independence from Belgium in 1960. Beginning in 1998, the Second Congo War involved seven foreign armies, these major actors driven largely by desires for control over natural resources, including diamonds, copper, zinc and coltan, these “economic forces and mineral resources fueling the war”. A peace accord in 2003 has not prevented sporadic fighting nor have the international peacekeeping forces been able to prevent rebel forces from intensifying assaults in the Ituri and North-Kivu provinces of the country in recent times.

Along with these conflicts has come widespread violence aimed at the civilian population, especially women. There is no shortage of reports or data documenting the abhorrent extent of sexual violence in the DRC. Primarily meant to protect the population, several reports show that armed forces have been complicit in sexual violence on many levels. Human Rights Watch (HRW) in their 2009 report “Soldiers who rape, commanders who kill” looks at the inability of the DRC government, military and judiciary to stop rape and the complicity of some of these actors in perpetuating sexual violence. Similarly, the group Doctors Without Borders (DWB) states, “more than three quarters of the women that we have treated have been raped by unknown armed soldiers.” In 2004, DWB treated 270 rape victims over the course of the year in North Kivu. Today, they treat that many victims of rape on average every month. While nearly 54 percent of those affected are ages 19 to 45, a startling 40 percent of victims are girls under the age of 18. Women are targets working in the fields. Women are targets walking home. Women are targets virtually everywhere.

Since 1999, the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC) has been on the ground trying to create peace. The UN has recently extended the MONUC mandate until 31 May 2010, with the next few months specifically aimed at protecting civilians as well as facilitating the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of Congolese armed groups and repatriation and resettlement of foreign armed groups. For years now, DRC President Joseph Kabila and MONUC have pushed a “zero tolerance” policy against sexual violence and misconduct by the armed forces. This objective has obviously not been met. The Kimia II military operations (in Swahili and Lingala, Peace II), which saw MONUC lending support to the DRC army (FARDC), despite the army being implicated in grave human rights violations, failing to stop sexual violence. Considered by UN human rights actors, like Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to be a “catastrophe” for human rights, Kimia II has been replaced by the FARDC’s new operation “Amani Leo” (“Peace Today”) which commenced in January 2010. It can only be hoped that the renewed MONUC mandate and Amani Leo operations make some progress towards the “zero tolerance” policy, which has seemed until now, just a policy on paper.

The power of such a zero tolerance policy, if implemented and effective, cannot be understated. It is not simply a question of a completely unacceptable situation with regards to women’s security. Central to the issue is the sheer lawlessness that results when the armed forces are the perpetrators of violence. Some potentially effective strategies have been proposed to achieve justice for victims and put an end to sexual violence, including by the Office of the UN Senior Adviser and Coordinator on Sexual Violence in the DRC. Their strategy talks of combating impunity for cases of sexual violence by strengthening the judiciary and putting in force the DRC’s 2006 laws on sexual violence. They also highlight the need to reduce vulnerability and exposure of women to sexual violence, with more effective responses from security forces and better vetting to exclude from security forces “individuals who lack integrity”.

Persistent calls have been made directly to President Kabila from political leaders in the US and Europe for an end to the sexual violence. During a visit to Goma, the capital of North Kivu, in August of last year, Hillary Clinton pushed for “no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence” in her meeting with Kabila, after first meeting with refugees at the Magunga camp. In December of last year, commenting on President Kabila’s declarations against violence, the Swedish European Union Affairs Minister Cecilia Malmstroem, whose country held the EU presidency until December of last year, reiterated “Congolese authorities are responsible for making sure the policy of zero tolerance is not merely words, but is also translated into reality”.

This is not an entirely new step. The EU has long been calling for an end to sexual violence in the DRC, with a resolution from January 2008 of the European Parliament noting that women in the eastern part of the DRC are being “systematically attacked on an unprecedented scale” with the atrocities against women structured around rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and murder having “far-reaching consequences including the physical and psychological destruction of women”. It further notes that although the DRC Humanitarian Action Plan 2008 reported 32,353 rapes during 2007, this was probably only a fraction of the total number.

Despite global pressure, reports on the ground are less hopeful. According to Refugees International, enforcement of the zero tolerance policy “especially of senior commanders, remains effectively non-existent”. Considered a “lawless world”, it is difficult to know what it will take to put an end to the rapes. Justice is weak in the DRC. UN Resolutions 1325 (2000) and 1820 (2008) on women and peace and security explicitly call for an end to sexual violence and demand the immediate end by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians with immediate effect. Resolution 1820 specifically states that, among other things, rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide. Yet, in practical terms, on a day to day basis, where can women find refuge?

The complexity of addressing these issues should not be underestimated. I am writing this piece now in an effort to join other NGOs, UN agencies and activists from the international community pushing to make sure that the past years of sexual violence do not remain the norm. I am writing as a reminder that “zero-tolerance” does not simply mean a reduction in numbers and must not only be words on paper. The global community MUST watch to ensure that President Kabila’s commitment to the ELIMINATION of sexual violence is made real.

Between the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs from the White House to the U.S. Capitol building, there’s a fascinating bit of political theater taking place.

Responding to Republican complaints that the negotiations on the health-care reform bills passed last year in the House and Senate fell far short of the benchmark for transparency Barack Obama had set when campaigning for the presidency (and they did), the president invited GOP and Democratic leaders to a health-care summit, scheduled for later this month. The whole event, the White House promised, would be televised — just as the Republicans said they want health-care negotiations to be.

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The Tea Party sprang to life in response to the financial crash that sent our economy into a tailspin. Until recently, it balanced two tendencies: hatred of big government and hatred of Wall Street. The combination (in the form of the bailouts and stimulus programs) provided a perfect target as economic hardship hit millions on Main Sreet.

But as the Tea Party becomes more structured and holds conventions like the one this past weekend featuring Sarah Palin, you can see its economic populism slipping away. Sure, there will be attacks against Wall Street’s privledges, but those are for show, not substance. Increasingly it is all about the bedrock conservative principles: smaller government, fewer taxes and a strong military. Jobs and Wall Street will become secondary issues even though millions of grassroots Tea Partygoers are still motivated deeply by these concerns.

Of course this is terrific news for Wall Street which has just awarded itself $150 billion in record bonuses while more than 28 million Americans are without jobs or forced into part-time work.

You won’t hear the Tea Partyites calling for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency or windfall profits taxes on bonuses. Instead they will rant about government interference in the economy and high taxes.

I mean, you can’t make this up. Wall Street goes on a gambling spree, wins big, and then crashes the economy. The federal government bails out the elites. Then Wall Street–still on the government dole–makes record profits and bonuses. And just when efforts for financial reforms inch forward in Congress, a grassroots movement emerges against government regulation and taxes, including those on Wall Street.

The underlying anger about the crash, the giveaways to Wall Street and the lack of jobs are still there. The means the field is open for a progressive populist movement. But where is it?

There are some progressive financial reform groups pressuring Congress to enact good legislation. There have even been a couple of mobilizations at banker meetings and at Ben Bernanke’s house. But overall, progressives have been AWOL when it comes to building a mass-based populist movement or anything close to it. (Except in Oregon: see “Watch out Tea Party, Progressive Anger is Alive and Well” )

Why is that?

Here’s what I’ve heard from progressives: We’re too old, too comfortable, too hooked on the Internet, too invested in the stock market, too invested in Obama, too demoralized; that the activists among us are too close to the Democrats, too far from the grassroots, too concentrated on health care reform, too concentrated on global warming, too besieged by other issues like racism, gay and lesbian rights, abortion rights, union survival, and on and on. You’d think that being a progressive activist was a liability rather than a major plus during this upheaval.

One colleague provides a very different line of inquiry. He argues that most progressives he knows actually have bought into neo-liberalism without even knowing it. He believes they have developed a deep and unquestioned faith that markets will right themselves with a nudge or two, and solve most of our most pressing problems.

I’ve spun this idea around to mean the following: Progressives see the current economic crisis as an aberration to an otherwise sound economic system. As a result, all it will take is a few financial reforms and more stimulus to get us back to normal – “normal” meaning we can return to our favored issue areas and continue the critical battles we have been fighting on social issues, the environment, racial equality etc. In short, there’s no compelling reason to stop what we’re doing in order to build something fundamentally new.

But what if American capitalism has radically changed? What if the old version — a system of markets moderated by government to produce a decent standard of living for most of its citizens – is gone?

IMaybe our system has morphed into a new billionaire bailout society where wealth is ever more concentrated, where economic life is every more dependent on large financial firms that must never be allowed to fail, and where public funds are ever ready to back up the financial arrangements of the super-wealthy.

A few reforms might not right this ship. Instead we may be facing a long dark decade of sky-high unemployment, repeated recessions and jobless recoveries. These problems are likely to be compounded with years and years of political gridlock as both parties feel pressured not to interfere with markets. Without a new movement I doubt we’ll see real controls that break up too-big-to-fail banks, limit obscene Wall Street salaries, and end casino finance. In our new billionaire bailout society we will not have enought jobs for all who need them.

I would love to be wrong. Maybe markets will bloom and new green jobs will flourish as we solve global warming and bring economic sustainability and security to our society. But look around you. We have the worst income and wealth distribution since 1929. We have the highest sustained unemployment since the Great Depression. Congress is gridlocked. And to top it off, a right-wing, anti-government, anti-regulation populist movement is gaining ground.

Let’s face it. When the crisis hit, we weren’t prepared. The time to have acted boldly was a year ago when bankers where on their knees begging for money. That was the moment to break up the big banks, slap on meaningful salary caps and windfall bonus taxes – and then use that money for job creation. That’s when we really had the chance to put a progressive mass movement on the streets to counteract the lobbying clout of Wall Street. That moment has passed and it’s painful to see it fade away.

If this analysis is correct, we’ll get more chances and relatively soon. The billionaire bailout society doesn’t give a damn about jobs. It can mint new wealth without even loaning out money. The disconnect between Main Street and Wall Street is profound and ever growing, as is the space for creating a new progressive populist movement.

I can’t provide you with a cookbook for organizing it. But I do know there are tens of thousands of progressive activists hard at work right now on their particular issues. They have more than enough talent and experience to build a national populist formation. But first they have to decide that taking on the billionaire bailout society is the most important work they can do, (the way a previous generation threw themselves into stopping the Vietnam War.)

We may not have a choice. The lethal combination of Wall Street’s economic domination and the Tea Party’s hatred of all things government is likely to overwhelm most other progressive causes. Building a progressive alternative to the Tea Party may be our only way out.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.