1. Pakistani Tribal Aid in Peril
The US earmarked $750 million dollars in aid for Pakistan’s embattled tribal regions. The NY Times:
The civilian aid program would provide jobs and schooling, build 600 miles of roads and improve literacy in an area where almost no women can read. It adds to the more than $1 billion in American military aid to Pakistan annually — much of which does not make its way to frontline Pakistani units, some American officials now acknowledge. The tribal area for which this new money is intended remains so unsafe that no senior American official has visited in the last nine months.
But US officials are ready to cancel the program because they can’t figure out how to administer it. Pakistan’s tribal areas are populated by Pashtuns, who have never been conquered and hate outsiders, especially Westerners.
“We are living in times when NGOs are considered to be all out to convert tribesmen,” Javed Iqbal, until recently the additional chief secretary of Federally Administered Tribal Areas, as the region is formally called. The title is a holdover from the British era. “To deal with the tribesmen, you have to understand the tribes,” Mr. Iqbal said. “You cannot ask a woman how frequently does she take contraception, which was one of the questions on an NGO questionnaire. The first reaction is going to box you in the face, and then tell you to get lost.”
To adminster the funds, the US had signed up contractors like DYNCROP. But that’s a bad idea:
But Mr. Iqbal said he was convinced that the for-profit companies would take a disproportionate amount of the program money. “Forty-eight percent of the program money goes to consultants,” he said.
In my opinion, the program must go foward. The Tribal Areas need development:
The region of 3.2 million people has no industry, virtually no work and no hope. Men aged 18 to 25, who are the target of the program, find offers of 300 rupees a day from the Taliban — about $5 — attractive. The men, almost entirely Pashtun, have little in common with the rest of Pakistan. Their Pashtun brethren live in the southern part of Afghanistan, astride a border that is extremely porous, allowing extremists to move easily back and forth.
“This is an extremely difficult undertaking in an extremely difficult part of the world,” said a senior American official at the United States Embassy in Islamabad after the presentation of an embassy PowerPoint slide show attended by nearly a dozen embassy officials. “Something like this hasn’t been tried on this scale in this part of the world.”
Read more here
2. Mod I(raq)cons: Riding a “Super Yanaha Helux,” “the wind whipping through his hair”I
t’s well known that Iraqis love soccer, fine haircuts, and soul/R&B like Lionel Richie. But now scooter mania has taken Baghdad, and Iraq has officially gone Mod! Cara Buckley of the New York Times wrote a fun story about the Mod craze hitting Mesopotamia:
Often imported from China and bearing almost familiar names like “Yomaha” or “Mucati Classic,” scooters have taken the city by storm, providing a nearly ideal way of getting about in a war-weary town riddled with checkpoints and bedeviled by car bombs.
Your typical Iraqi Mod doesn’t listen to his wife:
Mr. Jawad loves his scooter because, quite simply, it is fun, what with the wind whipping through his hair and car drivers gnashing their teeth as he blithely scoots by. “My wife tells me not to drive fast,” Mr. Jawad said, sharply inhaling the smoke. “I never obey what she says.”
Mod World:
Mr. Mustaf, who wears cowboy boots and has an easy grin, runs a shop in what is known as the motorcycle market in central Baghdad. Mr. Mustaf’s top seller, imported from China, is the “Super Yanaha Helux,” in cherry red. It costs $850, has shiny chrome rear-view mirrors and a speedometer that goes up to about 90 miles per hour, a speed he swears it can reach.
3. Sunni Nationalist All Armed-up With Nowhere To Go
What’s to come of all the Sunnis America’s arming in Iraq? They don’t want to join the govt. They just want money. But what happens when the money’s run out? Time’s Charles Crain, in Baghdad, on the Awakening Councils (referred to as the CLCs):
According to the U.S. military, the vast majority of CLCs — about 50,000 out of more than 70,000 — have no interest in joining Iraq’s police force of army. They joined the program for the prospect of a steady paycheck in Iraq’s moribund economy, and remain mistrustful of the Shi’ite-dominated government and its security forces.
The Iraqi government, in turn, is wary of integrating more than a small number of CLCs into the army or the police. Sometime next year then, tens of thousands of armed Sunni men — many with insurgent backgrounds — will find themselves unemployed. If that happens, the dramatic security improvements of 2007 may not survive in 2008.
If the security situation deteriorates further, the economic picture will only get bleaker. At that point, former CLCs may be faced with a choice between unemployment and a return to the ranks of the insurgency.
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