Hell of a Frank Rich column liberated here

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved “thousands of lives.” The White House’s journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé “may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs.”
Surely they jest. If this is one of our “most effective” programs, we’re in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring “traitors” like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
…
Soon to come are the Senate’s hearings on Mr. Goss’s successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He’s “the right man” to lead the C.I.A. “at this critical moment in our nation’s history.” That’s not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”
If Democrats and, for that matter, Republicans let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

Posted by: b | May 14 2006 14:50 utc | 4

Development as if the world mattered
L. Hunter Lovins
Natural Capitalism Solutions
http://www.natcapsolutions.org
Published in World Affairs Journal
Introduction
The world desperately needs a new model of development. Most of the world’s people are stuck in poverty, and all major ecosystems are in decline. Spending more money, however, will not by itself solve the problems. The answer must include fundamentally rethinking international development so that it implements world best sustainable development technologies in ways that promote the creation of locally controlled, viable private sectors.
The Challenge
In 2000, all 191 member-states of the UN endorsed the Millennium Development Goals. These set quantifiable targets for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, improving maternal health, reducing child mortality, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development by 2015.
Some progress has occurred. Between 1990 and 2002 average incomes increased by approximately 21 percent. The number of people in extreme poverty declined by an estimated 130 million. Child mortality rates fell from 103 deaths per 1,000 live births a year to 88. Life expectancy worldwide rose from 63 years to nearly 65 years. An additional 8 percent of the developing world’s people received access to water. And an additional 15 percent acquired access to improved sanitation services.
But implementation has been far from uniform across the world or across the Goals. Huge disparities exist across and within countries. Poverty remains significant in rural areas and urban poverty is vast, growing, and underreported by traditional indicators. Environmental progress, especially in the realm of climate change has been very limited.
Many analysts agree that the world will fail to meet the Goals. In 2002, Relief Web announced that progress in reducing hunger had virtually halted. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that that there were around 840 million undernourished people in 1998-2000, 799 million in the developing countries, 30 million in the countries in transition and 11 million in the industrialized countries. “In the worst affected countries, a newborn child can look forward to an average of barely 38 years of healthy life, compared to over 70 years of life in 24 wealthy nations.” One in seven children born in poor countries where hunger is most common (29,000 a day) will die before reaching the age of five.
Cut the statistics any way you like, the situation is grim: Over 4 billion people live in developing countries, with half of the world’s population living on less than $2 a day. UNICEF statistics show that almost 4,000 children die each day because they lack access to safe drinking water or sanitation. Eight million die a year because they are too poor to stay alive. In the past 50 years, almost 400 million people worldwide have died from hunger and malnutrition, or three times the people killed in all wars in the 20th Century.
Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Millennium Development Project, created to implement the Goals, in his brilliant recent article in Time magazine stated,“ This is a story about ending poverty in our time. It is not a forecast. I am not predicting what will happen, only explaining what can happen.” He goes on to say, “…Our task is to help people onto the ladder of development, to give them at least a foothold on the bottom rung, from which they can then proceed to climb on their own.”
He advocates an approach he calls Clinical Economics, based on providing clean water, healthy soils and a functioning health care system with the same enthusiasm that development experts have insisted that poor nations reform their economic systems. He calls for an approach like clinical medicine and likens the structural adjustments of programs like the International Monetary fund to the 18th century medicine that applied leeches to sick patients. He sensibly calls for providing the basic necessities of life to the poor around the world as the basis of development.
Sachs’ analysis of the classes of poverty, and what causes them is brilliant, but his article says little about how to go about lifting people from poverty. His recipe: the wealthy nations should meet their development pledges.
But unless significant changes are made in how development money is spent, and how development is done, such increases will not result in measurable decreases in poverty. And a rapidly growing world rapidly increasing its wasteful consumption would doom us all.
If the developing world seeks to lift itself out of poverty in the same inefficient way that the west has done, it will require three more earth’s worth of resources to meet the needs of the world’s consumers. Part of the reason that the world oil prices are now at record heights is that China has entered the world oil market. If the Chinese used oil at the same rate as Americans, by 2031 China would need 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world currently extracts 79 million barrels per day and may not be able to lift more. If China’s coal burning equaled current U.S. levels (nearly 2 tons per person) China would use 2.8 billion tons annually – more than the 2.5 billion tons the entire world now uses.
In April, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecological Assessment. The study, by 1,360 experts in 95 nations who drew on the work of 22 national science academies from around the world, reported that a rising human population has polluted or over-exploited two-thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends, ranging from clean air to fresh water, in the past 50 years.
“At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning,” said the 45-member board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan added, “The study shows how human activities are causing environmental damage on a massive scale throughout the world, and how biodiversity – the very basis for life on earth – is declining at an alarming rate.” Even if slow and inexorable degradation does not lead to total environmental collapse, the Assessment found, the poorest people of the world are still going to suffer the most.
One of the most serious challenges is that of climate change. In January 2005, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments, “Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose.” He concluded, “We are risking the ability of the human race to survive.” Pachauri agreed that the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on the poor. Many observers have issued similar or graver statements.
At the same time, however, books like the just released, Natural Advantage of Nations, the international bestseller, Natural Capitalism and a staggering array of others prove how the rapidly emerging best practice in sustainable technologies can meet basic human needs around the world and solve most of the environmental problems facing the planet at a profit.
The planet faces unprecedented perils. We have the answers at hand and we are failing to implement them. What is wrong with this picture?!
Development done wrong
In the West Central Highlands of Afghanistan runs a diversion canal for a micro-hydro electric power plant that is emblematic of what’s wrong, what the opportunities are and what needs to be done.
I know this because, in December 2004, lost and in a major winter storm that was settling over the Hindu Kush, I was taken in by an Afghan family who told me about it. I walked the old ditch to the penstock. Abandoned since the Soviets stripped the turbines from it, the diversion could supply a megawatt of power to the city of Bamiyan and to the thousands of rural people around it who now live in darkness when the sun leaves the sky.
On my return to Kabul, I asked the contractors responsible for bringing power to Afghanistan whether we might get the repair of the Bamiyan plant put high on their priority list
To their credit, they didn’t see why not. But this Afghan micro-hydro rig is a good example of development opportunities and challenges around the world. It could sustainably bring power, critical for development, to that region of the poorest country in the world outside of Africa. However, the people with the resources to make it happen have other demands on their attention. Presidents Bush and Karzai have made a multi-million dollar deal to build a massive powerline from the north to Kabul. One early proposal called for spending $2.7 billion to build coal plants across the north of the country to feed more power into that tenuous line.
The plan is flawed on several levels. Given the volatile regional security situation, and the ready availability of unexploded ordinance, it is not clear how long the line would operate. The money to build it will mostly be spent on western contractors. And any resulting power will only go to the people of Kabul and perhaps a couple of other cities, less than 20 percent of the population. Indeed around the world one quarter of all development capital goes to building large central power plants that rarely benefit the poor. But such high profile projects generally do get built.
To be sure, reliable power would dramatically improve the lives of people in Kabul. Life in the capital city without electricity is hard. And costly. When I was in Kabul in January 05, U.S. taxpayers were spending $4 million a month buying diesel from Pakistan to run the North Kabul Power plant, which delivers power only during the evening hours, if the recipients are lucky. Most of the city (and all rural areas) that can afford it rely on small diesel generators, whose exhaust mingles with dust from unpaved roads, and the smoke from wood and charcoal that provide 85 percent of the energy in the country, to utterly foul the air of Kabul. Even a fraction of this money, diverted to enabling local businesses to begin providing solar electricity, would result in more reliable power at roughly the same cost, while building viable local businesses, creating jobs, reducing dependency, and cleaning the environment.
But what about the other 80 percent of the population? What about my friends outside of Bamiyan? Using outdated technology and conventional thinking rather than best practice will ensure that Afghanistan remains the 6th poorest country in the world. It will also waste the hard-won legitimacy of the Karzai government, and expose the country to the influence of warlords who are counting on Karzai to remain the “Mayor of Kabul”.
Afghanistan must rebuild everything, providing housing, energy supply, food, water, sanitation, transportation, healthcare and security. At present however, official proposals for reconstruction make little effort to use state of the art sustainability technologies, despite the fact that the more appropriate technologies work better and are better suited to poor, widely distributed populations. Instead, most of the reconstruction projects wind up using cast-off equipment and approaches from Pakistan or the West simply because they have a lower up-front cost (though they commit the operators to pay higher running costs for the life of the project) or because vendors are more familiar with them. Existing reconstruction efforts approach each problem in isolation, missing opportunities to use whole-systems design to solve multiple problems with the same resources.
Massive central station power generation options not only require millions in funding from western donors, and western contractors to install them. The plants require a steady supply of coal or oil, fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, and whose availability and cost are indeterminate. Profits from building the plants and supplying the fuel line the pockets of large western companies. When these companies leave, little local capacity will have been created to offset the enormous debt by which the country will find itself burdened. The resulting power will have to be subsidized, as the urban poor cannot afford what it would take to pay off the cost of the power plant. They use the resulting energy wastefully. Demand rises for this artificially cheap power. Ministers beg for more donor money to pay the Bechtels of the world to build ever more power plants. And my friends in Bamiyan will continue to live in the dark.
Around the world, aid money tends to create perverse versions of a welfare society, dependent on big western contractors and foreign NGO’s. When the money runs out and the westerners leave, the people struggle on in poverty. Each “crisis du jour” repeats the process – money pours in to aid the afflicted people, but winds up in the pockets of developing country contractors. They deliver big power stations, conventional capital intensive water delivery systems, water treatment facilities, car based infrastructure, corporate health care models and inefficient tract housing development, approaches that are rarely best practice in the west, and are frequently wholly inappropriate to conditions in developing countries.
This contrast between Bamiyan micro-hydro rig and the Presidentially-mandated power line from the North are a microcosm of the sorts of allocations now made in the name of international development and poverty reduction around the world. They help to explain why little poverty is alleviated and the less developed countries remain on the international dole. Kabul, the epicenter of the international development community has been transformed from the city of gardens to a traffic-choked Mecca for development mercenaries, carpet-baggers and the “White Land Cruiser Brigade”. Western contractors vie for the billions being spent for powerlines, IT infrastructure, water projects, and building booms. Property prices have been bid up to the standard of Aspen or Tokyo.
The Afghan government recently acknowledged this. In April 2005 on the eve of a donor conference in Kabul President Karzai criticized the aid community “for squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid from the international community.”
At stake is over $10 billion dollars already pledged by the international donor community. The Karzai government wants to control the flow of that money. The NGO’s answer that the non-profit NGO’s are the most cost effective deliverers of services and that without them the Afghan humanitarian crisis would have been far worse. Indeed Karzai praised the “good work” of those NGOs serving the country’s development and humanitarian needs.
But there is no doubt that much of the money that should be spent to leverage the creation of Afghan capacity, to build a viable local private sector, has gone into the pockets of western companies and contractors. If Afghanistan manages to put the brakes on this sort of squander, the companies will just go elsewhere – it’s hard to get staff to agree to a post in Kabul anyway, unless you pay them several hundred thousand dollars a year.
Towards a New Strategy of Development
Consider another model of development. Imagine, a world in which no family needs to burn smoky dung or wood or oil lamps for light, where wireless digital communications are available to everyone, and where women and young people have illumination to become literate, to be able to see a brighter future reflected in the solar cells that power this vision. SELCO, India, the Solar Electric Light Company, sells solar electric panels that provide lighting and electricity to poor villagers, at monthly prices comparable to using traditional, less effective sources. Through its network of 25 centers across India, SELCO provides infrastructure solutions to underserved households and businesses. It has brought reliable, affordable, and environmentally sustainable electricity to 35,000 homes and businesses since 1995. Providing solar lighting and electricity, clean water and wireless communications, SELCO empower its customers by providing complete packages of products, services and consumer financing.
With solar power villagers can get communication technology, clean drinking water, refrigeration, power for clinics and other development technologies. SELCO gives examples of how with the ability to light even one bulb, villagers can provide light for silk worms, for looms, and moveable lights that can go room to room as needed. This gives them the basis for an income source that enables them to begin to climb Jeff Sachs’ development ladder.
SELCO’s system is entirely market based. It does not require government subsidies, yet it is lifting thousands of people from poverty vastly more effectively than most of the aid programs around the world. Since 1995, SELCO’s 165 employees have sold light and electricity to more than 150,000 people and built annual sales to $3 million.
SELCO offers individual homes and businesses advanced, inexpensive lighting, electricity, water pumping, water heating, communications, computing, and entertainment. Their systems do not require connection to a larger network. SELCO meets its customers where they live, partnering with rural banks, leasing companies, and micro-finance organizations to provide the necessary credit.
The company’s founder, Dr. Harish Hande, suggests that development experts rethink their definition of what poor people can afford. He argues that the poor actually spend a great deal of money on kerosene lamps, diesel for generators, and batteries for flashlights. They are capable of paying for a solar installation that would displace the more wasteful options, if institutions will lend for this at rates that they can repay. If people are told that the solar installation will cost them $30 a month, they tend to say that it is too expensive. But if asked to pay $1 a day, they agree, “Yes, we can do that.” In the SELCO model, the purchaser pays 20% down. SELCO provides financing that enables the buyer to pay off the system in 4 years at $10 – $20 per month. The financing matches a person’s ability to pay
Paul Polak of International Development Enterprises adds another dimension to SELCO’s work. A designer of technology for people at the bottom of pyramid making he calls for the world’s best designers to focus their energy of on the issues of rural poor. But he points out that design is only a quarter of the challenge. The real job is marketing, actually getting the growing number of appropriate technologies now available around the world to the people who need them, and in ways that they can afford to implement.
He cites what he calls the “Don’t bother” trilogy. If you have not had conversations with at least 25 poor people about whether the design will meet their needs, if you cannot sell at least a million of the devices and if the device will not pay for itself in the first year after a poor person purchases it, don’t bother.
The poor particularly need technologies that enable them to make a living that can raise them out of poverty. Most of the rural poor live on tiny farms from which they seek to eek out a subsistence living. To produce higher value, marketable, labor intensive crops, they urgently need such technologies as affordable ways to irrigate small plots, value added processing for their produce and markets for these crops. Polak advises that the design criteria should be “the ruthless pursuit of affordability to meet their needs.” People who live on the edge are very smart, he says. They survive under conditions that would defeat westerners accustomed to a higher standard of living. But to do this they have a very high discount rate: 100% a year. Given their very high cost of capital, they readily trade off quality for low cost.
This model of development starts its business planning from the bottom up. It asks how much does a farmer have to spend? What will your product do to increase an urban dweller’s income?
This has been the approach of such groups as the Intermediate Technology Development Group, which has for years worked in “hopeless” situations like the Sudan, assisting villagers to preserve food 10 fold longer through evaporative cooling, providing irrigation and energy technologies, and locally developed financing programs. It is the work of Engineers Without Borders, that brings sustainable technologies to individual villages, implementing them in conjunction with the villagers, who plan and construct the energy, water, sanitation, school or bridge projects. A heart-warming number of little groups around the world do this successfully in the most poverty stricken areas of the planet.
In China “Eco-machines” of living plants are cleaning the water in polluted canals, while creating habitat and beautiful community parkways. SEKEM, in Egypt, is using private enterprise to lift thousands of people out of poverty, deliver quality organic food to European markets, and now, create a University.
But such groups are rarely chosen to advise the development agencies, or to receive the massive aid contracts. What is needed is to merge the massive funding, and institutional capacity of the big donor agencies with the on-the-ground capability of the development technology groups.
My work in Afghanistan is a case in point. After 25 years of war, much of the country’s infrastructure is in ruins, or was never completed. In the wake of 9-11, the international community, recognizing the threat to world peace of a devastated Afghanistan, pledged billions of dollars to rebuild the country. This has created a unique, but narrow window of opportunity to rebuild the country using the growing body of best practice in sustainable technologies.
With leading international practitioners of sustainable development we are outlining a strategy to ensure that donor money can leverage the creation of local capacity, of viable, locally-owned private businesses able to sustainably meet the needs of Afghans even after the International eye has moved on.
In Afghanistan, where success is important not only to the Afghans, but a matter of American national security, it is urgent that Afghan reconstruction creates a robust infrastructure that delivers profitable and stable businesses as it rebuilds the entire economy.
USAID’s own guidelines state, “Environmental sustainability is integral to USAID’s overall goal. To meet this goal environmental considerations shall be incorporated into results planning, achieving and monitoring.” Little effort is being made by USAID, however, to enable local businesses to sell renewable, distributed generation, even though many American and European examples (below) show that these technologies are more reliable, and more cost effective. This may be starting to change. In spring 2005, Asian Development Bank announced a Technical Assistance program to promote the use of renewable energy.
In contrast, USAID is financing the construction of new medical clinics with no thought to insulation, solar orientation or other green building technologies that would enable the clinics to heat, cool and power themselves. Forty clinics were supposed to have been constructed, but so far only one has been completed, and with no energy budget, the doctor had to beg for a tiny diesel generator and the fuel to run it.
Conversations with the architect hired to assist this program revealed a pervasive unwillingness by U.S. contractors to implement green building practices, even though many U.S government buildings must now, by law, be constructed to these standards and doing this would enable the clinics to run more effectively and at lower cost.
Afghanistan has little money, but is rich in wind, sunshine and flowing water. Technologies using such distributed, renewable resources are the only approach that makes sense for meeting the needs of dispersed villages. A particularly appealing option is the use of biodiesel, or diesel made from vegetable oil. Sunflowers or other oil-rich crops grown to provide biodiesel would reduce the costly imports of diesel from Pakistan now used for transport and generators, and could be an alternative for farmers now growing poppies, currently 60 percent of the Afghan economy.
Renewable options are not only the best choice for developing countries; they are now the fastest growing form of energy supply around the world, and in many cases are cheaper than conventional supply. Solar thermal is outpacing all conventional energy supply technology around the world. Modern wind machines come second, delivering almost 8 gigawatts of new capacity a year, or more than nuclear power did at the peak of its popularity. The next fastest growing energy supply technology is solar electric, even at current prices.
Renewables can also be cheaper than any conventional supply. Wind in good sites now costs 3¢ per kilowatt hour. Just running a coal plant costs 5¢ to 6¢. And the wind power is free forever more, once the turbine is constructed. Solar is more expensive, although I spoke recently to an entrepreneur who states that within four years he can deliver amorphous thin-film solar at 3¢ a kilowatt hour. The company would be interested in licensing this technology to Afghans so that the panels and attendant jobs could be produced in Afghanistan. A wind company with a new type of wind machine that can be built by any competent metal fabricator is similarly interested in licensing its technology. A solar powered Internet Service Provider is very interested in bringing this business to Afghan companies. Such renewable technologies lend themselves to construction and delivery by small to medium sized enterprises, the sorts of locally owned businesses that can then go on bringing power to their country long after the development agencies and western money have gone home.
These technologies are what the best companies and communities around the world are implementing. In 1989, Sacramento California, shut down its 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant. Rather than invest in any conventional centralized fossil fuel plant, the local utility met its citizens’ needs through energy efficiency, and such renewable supply technologies as wind, solar, biofuels and distributed technologies like co-generation, fuel cells, etc. In 2000 an econometric study showed that the program has increased the regional economic health by over $180 million, compared to just running the existing nuclear plant, The utility was able to hold rates level for a decade, retaining 2,000 job in factories that would have been lost under the 80% increase in rates that just operating the power plant would have caused. The program generated 880 new jobs, and enabled the utility to pay off all of its debt. The Governor of Pennsylvania recently announced the opening of a factory to make wind machines. Creating 1,000 new jobs over the next five years, it is the biggest economic development measure for Johnstown, PA, in recent memory. The City of Chicago underwrote Spire solar to open a manufacturing plant in Chicago. The City wanted the jobs and to be able to install solar on municipal buildings. California has announced that it will spend over $8 million installing solar in 2006, and create a $1.5 billion investment fund to help environmentally responsible companies that are developing cutting-edge clean energy technologies. Germany recently installed a 10-megawatt solar power plant. The European Union plans to be half renewable by 2050, getting 10 percent of its electricity and 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2010.
In January 2005 I met with officials at the Energy Ministry, including Ismael Khan, the new Minister of Energy and Water. His Excellency has since expressed great interest in renewable energy, but lacks the consulting expertise, and has few resources with which to pursue a more appropriate energy strategy for the country. In similar conversations, the Dean of Engineering at Kabul University showed great enthusiasm for a program to train renewable energy technicians, but has no resources to undertake such a program, though the Asian Development Bank may begin to fill this gap. At the moment, the Engineering Department does not even have functional computers for its students.
Collectively, the array of sustainability practices such as efficient and renewable energy supplies, green building technologies, efficient water treatment and delivery systems, and sustainable approaches to providing food and health care can do a better job of meeting development needs in Afghanistan than the conventional approaches offered by the western consulting firms with whom USAID typically contracts.
Sustainable solutions are easier for local small businesses to deliver than the conventional approaches favored by USAID’s usual contractors. If some of the money now going to conventional solutions were diverted to financing, training and supporting local entrepreneurs, Afghans could meet basic human needs while protecting and enhancing not only their natural capital but also their social fabric.
Afghanistan is lucky. It has money. The Asian Development Bank provided a grant to bring solar energy, wind power and micro-hydro to Afghanistan. The ADB press release states:
The grant would demonstrate how solar energy could enhance the quality of life in poor, remote villages, which could not be connected to wider power grids.
Most of Afghanistan’s population have no access to modern energy sources like electricity and gas and are forced to rely on traditional fuels like firewood. This depletes the country’s forests, damaging the environment, the ADB said.
However, the country has a great potential for solar power since the sun shines for about 300 days a year in Afghanistan.
The grant would be used to provide solar systems to communities on a pilot basis and to train 10 people from different ethnic groups as solar technicians at a training centre in India.
Upon returning to Afghanistan, they would train 10 additional people from their communities.
It is hoped that solar energy systems in Afghanistan could be used to provide lighting for literacy programs, provide water for clinics and to power water pumps and irrigation systems, the bank added.
But in the rest of the world the usual development scenario is playing itself out. I returned from Afghanistan in January 2005 to a phone call from Dr Bernard Amadei, the saintly founder of Engineers Without Borders asking, “Come with me to Washington. The Engineering Societies have asked us to come talk about how to do the tsunami reconstruction.” Bernard,” I answered, I kind of have my hands full with Afghanistan….”
“That’s the point,” he argued, “The approach you are putting forth there is the same approach that is needed for rebuilding from the tsunami. We have the chance to do it right the first time.”
So we went to D.C. We listened to a beleaguered official from U.S. Agency for International Development, who had literally been plucked several days before from Afghanistan and flown to D.C. to marshal resources for the Indian Ocean crisis. He asked the audience to give him a week to get organized before deluging him with bids. Instead he became the epicenter of a feeding frenzy as representatives of Bearing Point, Halliburton and all the big infrastructure purveyors ignored his plea and thrust their glossy brochures upon him.
But we also convinced the US Engineering societies that their money would be better spent with Engineers Without Borders, working village by village to bring sustainable technologies to meet basic human needs and to implement them in ways that build local capacity, and leverage the donor money to create viable local private sector, capable of delivering these services long after the world aid community has moved on to the next crisis du jour.

Posted by: You Asked | May 14 2006 16:42 utc | 6

Happy Motherzs day mothers…I find it funny how many people know nothing of the origin of Mothers day. I posted the following (see below)to a so called liberal board and was astounded at the people who had no clue about mothers day; and the flack I got for bringing up the war.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO THE THOUSANDS OF MOTHERS WHO WILL NEVER SEE THEIR CHILDREN AGAIN THANKS TO A WAR STARTED WITH LIES.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 14 2006 18:27 utc | 8

@You Asked
I didn’t ask for a book to be posted,geez…

Posted by: Anonymous | May 14 2006 18:41 utc | 10

I like Frank Rich. He wrote an excellent analysis of the regime’s “reaction” to 9/11 right after same, and was subsequently banished to the Magazine for three or four years.
The article you quote is half “piling-on” the “traitors” in the White House and half cannonization of the NYTimes and Washington Post.
The NYTimes can afford to rehabilitate Rich now that they have succeeded in destroying Iraq. The goals of their war-mongering are accomplished and they can read the wind sock at this point and “get right with god”, as their Xtian neocon bedmates might say.
What Rich has said is plucked out of the air we are all breathing these days. What he, chastened, has added is a shameless defense of the NYTimes’ yellow journalism, so instrumental in getting the war in Iraq started.
I have no quarrel with Frank Rich. He’s just a poor human like myself, with the added misfortune of working for the NYTimes.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | May 15 2006 0:27 utc | 12

Y’all remember Fran of course. Never hear from her any more here because she’s a regular over at European Tribune. However she just posted a real uplift for me.
After Billmon posted Leviathan I went into a bit of a funk considering the seeming hopelessness of it all but thanks to Fran’s recollection of one of the 20th century’s greatest, I feel reinvigorated.
“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it … always.”
Gandhi
Thanks Fran.

Posted by: Juannie | May 15 2006 0:42 utc | 14

@Juannie, I am still lurking around here and once in a while even post, wouldn’t want to miss it. Glad to know you also visit ET and happy to hear the Gandhi quote was uplifting to you. 🙂

Posted by: Fran | May 15 2006 4:51 utc | 16

Here is Negroponte’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in the EFF lawsuit. Not surprising, but depressing nonetheless.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | May 15 2006 8:21 utc | 18

Thanks, Uncle.
I’m not despairing but it is good advice. As the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.” I think he was referring to his decision to pursue journalism as a profession, and what to focus on. Of course, that was the Hell’s Angels, (great book by the way) and the Nixon presidential campaigns.
A friend told me of a shakedown in Mexico; he was drunk and got a bit behind his friends after a night of fun in this resort town — in Mexico the resorts are self-contained, but close early. There’s always the nearby town that beckons with its promise of the wild life including tequila shots, music and bars that don’t close at 10 pm.
Anyway, drunk as he was sobriety hit as soon as the cops, guns at hip, pushed him into their white, star-decalled pickup truck. This wake-up call prompted his negotiation of the acceptable fee (much less than their first request) that was eventually settled on.
So it is true that when the going gets tough the tough get going.
I heard it first-hand.

Posted by: jonku | May 15 2006 9:17 utc | 20

Asia Times’ Spengler
is still as loveable as ever.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | May 15 2006 11:12 utc | 22

Here’s another bit of interesting news regarding Israeli-Egyptian
cooperation and the “unintended” side-effects
of terrorist raids at Sinai tourist resourts.
The credibility is certified by the presence
of the redoubtable and well-nigh ubiquitous
Al Zarqawi.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | May 15 2006 12:28 utc | 24

ABC News, NY Times, WashPost under Federal surveillance!”

Posted by: jj | May 15 2006 19:43 utc | 26

Cloned Poster, I am surprised – because I thought the US had already imposed a ban on arms sales to Venezuela quite some time back. As far as I can remember only a few months ago Spain was not able to sale military planes to Venezuela because they contained US technology.

Posted by: Fran | May 15 2006 20:44 utc | 28

a swedish kind of deat-
Now U See Them, Now U Don’t
Maybe the numbers change on whether or not its payday… the whole thing seems like some sort of an unemployment compensation that keeps many Iraqis busy.
A few million dollars here or there when needed to swell an army for an upcoming speech by Bush or Rumsfeld is nothing to the billion dollar slush funds that are available.
Don’t know what is really going on – but nothing would surprise me. Its obvious though the U.S. is afraid to allow a real Iraqi army to form.

Posted by: Rick Happ | May 16 2006 5:35 utc | 30

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.”
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Against a fence
So whatever idiot wrote that, he obviously doesn´t believe in increased efficiency.

Posted by: b | May 16 2006 14:13 utc | 32

Arch war criminal Kissinger is coming out against an attack on Iran
A Nuclear Test for Diplomacy

The diplomacy appropriate to denuclearization is comparable to the containment policy that helped win the Cold War: no preemptive challenge to the external security of the adversary, but firm resistance to attempts to project its power abroad and reliance on domestic forces to bring about internal change. It was precisely such a nuanced policy that caused President Ronald Reagan to invite Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to a dialogue within weeks of labeling the Soviet Union as the evil empire.

Why would he do so if an attack were not imminent?

Posted by: b | May 16 2006 17:23 utc | 34

@Uncle Scam:

You’ve missed the point of that story. The problem isn’t that they have spliced a human gene into rice — it’s done often enough these days that it’s no shocker. (GM bacteria are a major source of insulin. Ask your local diabetic.) The issue is that they are growing the hybrid outdoors. Even growing the stuff in some sort of protected area would be dangerous enough, although possibly justifiable if the benefits were great enough and the safegaurds sufficient, but this is just unconscionable.

After all, there is already a bad track record on the unintended spread of GM crops. Leaving aside the argument in favor of biodiversity — which is a relatively subtle one — there is no information on the long-term effects of any particular GM species. For all we know, eating anti-diarrhea rice for ten years causes you to develop colon cancer.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 16 2006 22:21 utc | 36

The diplomacy appropriate to denuclearization is comparable to the containment policy that helped win the Cold War:
This clarifies a lot, since the “I’m out of names” in power – e.g. cheney-rumbo – opposed containment!!
truth gets vicious – you make that sound more neutral than it is. Not only are there not appropriate sums funding long term experimentation, but anyone coming up w/results that make genetically mutilated organisms look bad is hard pressed to get tenure, or maintain their professional reputation. (Do you perchance recall the eminent Brit. researcher a few yrs. ago whose reputation was destroyed after finding that eating genetically mutilated potatoes caused disastrous feedback to other organs in its body? Wish I could pull that up.) The Cal. (UCB Prof. who did the study showing contamination in Mex. corn from the garbage grown here that blew down there had to wage a fierce campaign to get tenure. Barely prevailed w/lots of help.)

Posted by: jj | May 17 2006 1:50 utc | 38

Truth, you are attacking me for something I wasn’t even discussing. I was merely pointing out that we know virtually nothing about the risks ‘cuz the Industry is doing its best to suppress & otherwise retard research. They can’t claim it withstands scientific scrutiny while suppressing such scrutiny, nor should anyone trust anything brough to market in such a state.
I do not agree that genetic mutilation is a term of propaganda. To me genetic modification rightly pertains to any modification that could conceivably occur in nature. When you move beyond those bounds – as in mixing fish genes in tomatoes, etc. etc., you are mutilating the genetic makeup of that organism. It’s as if those clowns read about evolution in Chapter 5; and now in Chapter 6 figure they can just ignore it.
further, if we understand Whitehead’s notion in the context of evolution – that every point in space prehends every other point in space – it’s clear that butterflies are the way they are ‘cuz corn is the way it is….all species are interlinked. Ceasing genetic mutilation, merely respects the precautionary principle, and the integrity of evolution.
If you’re concerned w/biodiversity, it’s basically toast in agribusiness irrespective of the gmo deadend. We’re as much sitting ducks for famine as the Irish were when they lost 1M people to the potato famine ‘cuz they planted one type of potato. For starters, corn is all one species. Not only that, but US gov. used to maintain a gene bank so that at least the genetic material of a wide range of species would be preserved. W/acession of radical right in ’80, that has ceased as well. Commercial ag. is nothing but turning the earth into an outdoor factory floor.

Posted by: jj | May 17 2006 4:50 utc | 40

@jj:

To me genetic modification rightly pertains to any modification that could conceivably occur in nature. When you move beyond those bounds – as in mixing fish genes in tomatoes, etc. etc., you are mutilating the genetic makeup of that organism.

Actually, I’ve been pondering that very point, recently. You are presupposing that what humans do is somehow “outside” nature, that humans are, in some way related to physics, “special”. I disagree. Everything that actually happens is natural, unless you believe in something outside nature. I don’t. And I suggest that even if you do, you don’t bother basing your arguments on it, because there are perfectly good arguments that don’t require it.

Somebody or other said that a chemistry professor is an atom’s way of thinking about atoms. Well, in that same vein, human beings are nature’s way of making certain otherwise unlikely things happen. From a moral perspective (which generally means a human perspective of one type or another), mother nature is a bit of a sociopath; maybe right now she is rubbing her hands together and saying “at long last, a fish-tomato hybrid; I’ve been waiting for eons but the stupid fish wouldn’t get out of the water and mate with the dratted tomatoes, and even if they did, that !@#$%^& fish sperm just can’t manage to bind with the tomato genes. Finally.” Then she goes and pulls the wings off a few flies, just for fun.

Yes, human processes could end up killing most higher lifeforms on the planet, but ordinary “natural” processes could do that, too, such as a supervolcano. There’s nothing unnatural about it, just unusual in human experience, and immoral (again, a human description).

Furthermore, “unnatural” behavior is normal for humans. Right now, you are reading this message, which is unnatural. Your eyes are not designed for this. If you keep it up in the long term, you will go blind. (Or at least end up with bad eyesight.) To read, you are deliberately misusing parts of your brain which serve much more mundane purposes. (See, for further expansion of this idea, Harold Klawans’ very readable book strange behavior: Tales of Evolutionary Neurology.)

Modifying the environment is “natural” behavior for humans. Every culture which has entered a previously uninhabited area has altered it. Including the cultures that lefties tend to idolize as being in tune with nature. (The native americans, for example, entered the americas just before the extinction of many large preditors and the creation of a new desert. Those could be a series of coincidences — and then again, Bush could be right about global warming. Realistically, though…) Ecological change is natural for humans. (And not just humans; we’re just the only species to get away with it in the long term — the oxygen-based atmosphere on Earth is the result of a species of single-celled organisms called stromatolites which created all the oxygen and then went nearly extinct because of the sudden development of oxygen-breathing species that ate stromatolites. Now they only survive in a few isolated regions.)

So: if modifying the environment is “natural”, why shouldn’t we do it? Quite simple: predicting the results of our actions is “natural” for humans, and so is a desire to keep the species going. I won’t continue the argument — I tried, and then realized it’s been done many times before, and I’m sure you’ve read it already.

Similarly, if we’re going to protest GM crops, the reason should not be because they are “unnatural” but because they are dangerous to humanity. Dangerous on a number of levels, too: they can be dangerous directly by being poisonous (as with the GM potatoes, or even just by being a carcinogen in the long term), or they can be an incitement to famine through a loss of diversity, or they can have unforeseen consequences to the environment beyond simple crops. (What happens if some new “escaped” GM hybrid leaves a chemical in the soil that prevents nitrogen-fixing bacteria from ever growing in it again? Oops!)

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 17 2006 6:54 utc | 42

Here is a link to an HTML version of the Joe Galloway / DiRita exchange.

the question is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retirement as that army collapses for lack of manpower, lack of money to repair and replace all the equipment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fixing those problems because billions were squandered on weapons systems that are a ridiculous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/22, the osprey, the navy’s gold plated destroyers and aircraft carriers and, yes, nuclear submarines whose seeming future purpose is to replace rubber zodiac boats as the favorite landing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of billions) meanwhile the pentagon, at the direction of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deployment of an anti-missile system whose rockets have yet to actually get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more multiple billions.
…
i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a struggle that grows out of my obligation to and love for america’s warriors going back 41 years as of last month.
there are many things we all could wish had happened.
i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, “You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don’t quit now…”
Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty.
i could wish for so much.
i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time.

Posted by: b | May 17 2006 10:03 utc | 44

that article b linked to on the contingency plans for attacking iran states that the main plan is to use b-2’s from afb’s in missouri, guam & diego garcia. news on the whiteman afb site shows that more than 200 airmen from there have been deployed to andersen afb on guam, where b-2’s are replacing the b-1b lancers “as part of the continuous bomber rotation.”

Posted by: b real | May 17 2006 15:23 utc | 46

“van ripper.” hilarious but incredibly weird.

Posted by: slothrop | May 17 2006 18:21 utc | 48

TTGVWYCI,

@jj:
To me genetic modification rightly pertains to any modification that could conceivably occur in nature. When you move beyond those bounds – as in mixing fish genes in tomatoes, etc. etc., you are mutilating the genetic makeup of that organism.
Actually, I’ve been pondering that very point, recently. You are presupposing that what humans do is somehow “outside” nature, that humans are, in some way related to physics, “special”. I disagree.

You are attacking semantics. The sentence “could conceivably occur in nature”, is though semantically ambigious very clear in its contents. That which could occur without hightech gadetry. And genetic mutilation is from my point of view a very appropriate term.
When you move bits of genetic code around with the low level of understanding that we have about what it does, it is hacking the code in a very ugly way. Something in a set of genes appears to cause something and then you pick it up and smack it into another creatures DNA. It is like wanting to create a writing program with subtraction and ending up stuffing half the code from a spreadsheet program into the writing programs code. I would call that mutilated code. Therefore I have no problem with “genetic mutilation”.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | May 17 2006 19:57 utc | 50

Watch out for the dinosaurs, SKOD.
Don’t like their code mutilated.
Couple movies out about it, as I remember.

Posted by: Village Idiot | May 18 2006 0:08 utc | 52

My Lai like killing in Haditha confirmed

Posted by: b | May 18 2006 4:47 utc | 54

Wonder if they will run this one on Animal Planet as an antro-documentary:
It’ll Drive the Fundamentalists Banannas

Posted by: Village Idiot | May 18 2006 13:01 utc | 56

Sorry for the typo’s doing three things at one again…
Well at least he is under oath…whatever that means.
If I understood correctly, Harman also said the executive branch has been violating this law since the program began (in 2001?) and only fully complied by having yesterday’s (power point presentation-no court reporter) briefing.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 18 2006 14:57 utc | 58

Unfortunately, “The Long War” is now a regular part of jargon as they seem to all be using it.
Uncle, that’s why we stand no chance of getting our country back w/out blowing 911 bullshit out of the water.
blogs are soo pathetic, I’m beyond despair. They are so relentlessly focused on trivia that some, like aravosis’ which is garbage ‘cept for gay stuff – hence my decision to deal w/it by simply calling it a gay blog – has even gone so far as to support the Destruction of the Net. His top ad is link to Pirates leading charge to destruction. Same w/firedoglake. 2 less bookmarks. Elites were lucky they have a buffoon such as chimpy to distract sheepies from the real enemy. Even when they know who is planning to destroy the web, it’s fine w/them…
Time to move on…

Posted by: jj | May 18 2006 17:30 utc | 60

Unfortunately, “The Long War” is now a regular part of jargon as they seem to all be using it.
I think someone posted a link over here a month or so ago to a Pentagon Powerpoint presentation on “The Long War”.
Biggest bunch of hose shit and strategic nonsense I’ve ever seen. Keep the military and the defense industries rolling in dough more like it.
@JJ:
The bigger blog stars have probably already adopted all the mannerisms of the MSM stars, I’d guess from looking at the thing. Probably mousse their hair before they hit the keyboard.

Posted by: Groucho | May 18 2006 18:36 utc | 62

Whoops — that’s “Oklo”, not “Okio”.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 19 2006 1:01 utc | 64

benjamin, from one of the early versions of ‘reproducible art’ essay:

A different utopian will, moreover, is asserted in revolutions. For apart from the utopia of the second nature, there is a utopia of the first, and the former is closer to realization than the latter.’ The more widely the development of humanity ramifies, the more openly utopias based on the first nature (and especially the human body) will give place to those relating to society and technology. That this regression is provisional can be taken for granted. The problems of the second nature, the social and technological ones, must be very close to resolution before those of the first-love and death-can be distinguished even in outline. (To be sure, some of the most far-sighted minds of the bourgeois revolution refused to acknowledge this. Sade and Fourier envision the direct realization of hedonistic life .2 By contrast, this aspect of utopia is a second-order priority in Russia. Instead, the planning of collective existence is being combined with technical planning on a comprehensive, planetary scale.) (It is no accident that forays into the Arctic and the stratosphere were among the first great acts of the pacified Soviet Union.) If, in this context, one thinks of the slogan “blood and soil,” fascism can be seen as trying to block at one stroke the way to both utopias. “Blood” runs counter to the utopia of the first nature, which strives to make its medicine a playground for all microbes. “Soil” goes against the utopia of the second nature, which for fascism is realized only by the type of man who ascends into the stratosphere in order to drop bombs.

just curious. where does the 1st & 2nd nature stuff come from?

Posted by: slothrop | May 19 2006 4:06 utc | 66

@b real:

Whoops! You’re right! (Sorry jj, if you care one way or the other! I scrolled back up to find the comment to which I was replying and hit your signature at about the right height.)

I don’t buy your arguments. Humans are not alienated from “first nature”. Like other species, they simply prefer some things to others, but have devised ways to avoid the things they don’t like. Wild animals won’t go out in a storm, or the cold, unless they have a compelling reason to do so. Human beings, have the same preferences, we’ve just learned how to create areas that are arbitrarily comfortable. The fact that we tend to seek places with nearby foliage and water — compare some real estate prices — suggests this.

Furthermore, you are making the common mistaken assumption that living things get “better” as they evolve. To you, the idea that a species could evolve which was destructive is “a joke”. Well, why not? You can develop cancer without exposure to “second nature” (in fact, even an organically grown vegetable eaten raw is very slightly carcinogenic, because it contains carbon 14 which is radioactive) so why do you doubt that “first nature” can produce a species which is hazardous to the other species by default? The only difference between a human society and, say, the control structure of a beehive (aside from scale, anyway, and the fact that bees make honey) is individual intelligence, and most of the destructive behavior you mention comes about as a result of people following instinct — feed yourself, stay warm, and reproduce in the easiest way possible.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 19 2006 4:40 utc | 68

@jj:

Um, that’s what I was saying. Read it again.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | May 19 2006 5:18 utc | 70

@truth
i should clarify a couple points. first, of course we are not really alienated from the primeval natural world & the ecological system, but, in the context of the guiding ideas and historical behavior of western civilization, we’ve done nearly everything in/conceivable to delude ourselves into believing otherwise. (for example – indigenous peoples traditionally had no such distinction between first vs second natures b/c they lived primarily w/i a completely integrated milieu.) the realm of non-indigenous influence goes way beyond simply devising ways to avoid things we don’t like in the pursuit of an instinctual survival impulse. the deliberate annihilation of key components of our natural environments does not increase the odds of our survival, but rather works to guarantee the opposite.
second, i suppose that distinctions should be made in defining ‘evolution’ in terms of social vs biological context. i mixed the two together in my post by conflating how western civies have moved thru various stages (not necessarily advancing) pulling us further away from the biotic chain of life w/ genetic mutation of the species. the misanthropic snark popped up out of frustration on my part. don’t read too much into it.
while it may not have been made clear by my post, i don’t make the assumption that either concept of evolution has to tend toward refinement & superior adaptability. also, wrt to another assumption you seem to have drawn from me – why do you doubt that “first nature” can produce a species which is hazardous to the other species by default – i don’t and it does.

Posted by: b real | May 19 2006 15:38 utc | 72