The two coalition government parties in Pakistan, Zardari’s (Bhutto) PPP and Shraif’s PML-N, were not able to find unity over the reinstatement of the constitutional court judges. These were fired by now president Musharraf. If those judges would be reinstated they would have been likely to rule Musharraf out of office. But they would also have picked on Mr. Ten Percent Zardari for corruption.

A variant to get rid of the despised Musharraf was found yesterday. Zardari and Sharif gave an ultimatum to Musharraf, to go in grace or to get impeached. Musharraf canceled his China visit and planed to fight by legal means, i.e. defend himself against impeachment in the parliament.

Today PPP and PML-N announced their decision to go forward:

President Pervez Musharraf will have to face impeachment under Article 47 of the Constitution if he fails to take vote of confidence from the assemblies immediately.

This was announced by Co-chairman Pakistan People’s Party, Asif Ali Zardari at a joint press conference with Pakistan Muslim League-N Chief, Nawaz Sharif, here at Zardari House on Thursday.

I am not sure yet what the legal consequences of a certain loss in a vote of confidence are, but it sure would be a moral delegitimation for Musharraf in his current position.

The impeachment move might be dangerous. Musharraf can dissolve the parliament and call (or not) for new elections. He would need the support of the army for this as such a move would lead to unrest in the streets. In an unlikely variant the army itself might be inclined to do a coup against Musharraf and the elected government.

Pakistan has inflation at over 20%, daily failure of electricity in its biggest cities and bloody unrest in the tribal areas. What it needs most is a stable and united government. With Musharraf gone, there would be at least a chance for such a government to evolve.

McClatchy: Iraqi parliament adjourns without setting elections

The failure to pass the law, which would govern elections in provinces across the country, may push the elections into next year. If elections don’t happen by the end of this year, it could be July before the balloting could be carried out, U.N. spokesman Said Arikat said.

For possibly another year huge parts of the Iraqi society will lack representation in the power mix and the billion dollar gravy train that comes with representation.

As these groups have no chance to express their political will through elections for another year, the may revisit the alternative and again resort to violence.

Such groups are:

• Sunni ‘Awakening’ groups in Anwar
• Turkomen and Arabs in Kirkuk
• Sadr’s proletarian Shia constituency
• refugees in and outside of Iraq

The Iraqi parliament members will now take their undeserved vacation in London, Dubai or wherever and the people will swelter in the Iraqi sun and think about ways and means to change the situation.

Some will certainly come up with interesting but bloody ideas.

There is bunch of new credit card regulations coming from the Federal Reserve and a law over credit cards is creeping its way through congress. Most of the proposed actions will be watered down or even turned to credit card company favors. In the second quarter Master Card and American Express spent $1.1 million each on lobbying efforts.

There are some big perversions within the U.S. credit card system. A little known one I stumbled upon is the relation of credit card interest rates and the FICO score which is used to evaluate ‘creditworthiness’.

There are several components in the FICO calculation. One is them:

The FICO score evaluates your total balances in relation to your available credit. This is known as credit utilization. Credit cards that are "maxed out" can lower your score. Try to spend only 30% of your credit limit.

Currently many credit card companies are lowering their customers credit limits without prior notice. They argue that this protects them from bad customers who max-out their cards before going bankrupt.

But the measures are taken against all customers in an area or of a specific class independent on the actual risk. The interest rate credit card holders have to pay on any balance
is partly determined by the FICO scores. Thereby lowering of their credit
limit increases the interests the customers have to pay.

High credit limits are often used as a marketing gimmick to attract new customers. Lowering those limits is sold to the public as cautious business practice.

But I suspect that it is simply used to increase the income of these companies. When they lower the credit limit on whole segments of customers as they seem to do, they may prevent some damage from a few percent of customers that go bankrupt. But at the same time they increase the interest rates all customers in those segments have to pay.

As far as I can tell this perversion will not be addressed by the fed or by congress.

General McCaffrey is a war criminal and pentagon propagandist. He was recently in Afghanistan where he met about zero Afghans but lots of military folks. He wrote a report (pdf) about his short trip.

Besides a lot of partisan fluff it includes some insight into the situation as McCaffrey learned them during various working lunches and dinneres:

Afghanistan is in misery. […] The Afghan government at provincial and district level is largely dysfunctional and corrupt. The security situation (2.8 million refugees); the economy (unemployment 40% and rising, extreme poverty 41%, acute food shortages, inflation 12% and rising, agriculture broken); the giant heroin/opium criminal enterprise ($4 billion and 800 metric tons of heroin); and Afghan governance are all likely to get worse in the coming 24 months.

Note the missing stats of the number of bombs dropped by the ‘allies’.

McCaffrey also remarks on an issue I mentioned in my piece about Haji Habibullah Jan – the critical lack of ‘Unity of Command’ in Afghanistan:

There is no unity of command in Afghanistan. A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the
Afghan theater of operations does not exist. There is no single military headquarters tactically commanding all
US forces. All NATO military forces do not fully respond to the NATO ISAF Commander because of extensive
national operational restrictions and caveats. In theory, NATO ISAF Forces respond to the (US) SACEUR…but
US Forces in ISAF (half the total ISAF forces are US) respond to the US CENTCOM commander. However, US
Special Operations Forces respond to US SOCOM…..not (US) SACEUR or US CENTCOM. There is no
accepted Combined NATO-Afghan military headquarters. There is no clear political governance relationship
organizing the government of Afghanistan, the United Nations and its many Agencies, NATO and its political and
military presence, the 26 Afghan deployed allied nations, the hundreds of NGO’s, and private entities and
contractors. There is little formal dialog between the government and military of Pakistan and Afghanistan,
except that cobbled together by the US Forces in Regional Command East along the Pakistan frontier.

Such an alphabet soup of command acronyms will never be able to do anything but seed more chaos.

There is no common policy on Afghanistan among the ‘allies’. There is no one in lead, no single political concept or development strategy. While accusing its allies over ‘caveats’,  the U.S. has the biggest military caveats over its troop. It will not subordinate them to a unified NATO command.

The other NATO countries will not subordinate their troops to U.S. command. Their voters do not like the U.S. ‘style’ of bomb, bomb, bomb counter-insurgency and do not want to get involved into the civil war between Pashtuns and Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen) warlords or a big clash with Pakistan.

The solution in Afghanistan is not more troops and more partners but less. Ruling in Afghanistan has always been decentralized. In 2002 the occupation powers installed a centralized system under their chosen mayor of Kabul, Hamid Karzai. That immediately led to cronyism and big scale corruption.

McCaffrey and others now call for more Afghan troops to stand up. But how will Afghanistan ever be able to pay 200,000 soldiers plus 200,000 policemen? Unlike Iraq it does not have the economy to support so many security forces.

The Taliban destroyed a lot of the traditional tribal structures and their administrative, political and security functions. But the remains of these could probably be revived and integrated into something that resembles the traditional federal Afghan state. To do so would require ‘the west’ to admit lots of errors, change its ‘we know’ attitude and to dissemble the warlord hierarchies in Kabul.

That is unlikely to happen. Much more likely is a further descent into chaos and in the end a soviet like retreat of ‘western’ forces and another civil war in Afghanistan after which some authoritarian victor takes over the mess.

As Politico writes about Ron Suskind’s new book:

Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s "Meet the Press."

Rereading the original Coughlin story:

Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

…
The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq’s ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.

"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda," he said. "But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."

Allawi is well known to be a CIA asset and seems to well have been the messenger between CIA and Coughlin.

When the White House ordered the CIA to forge the letter with regard to al-Qaeda, it also ordered to include something that furthered their claim on Niger uranium shipment. When the Coughlin story appeared the Niger claim had already been debunked. I wonder why it was included at all.

We still do not know if the original Niger uranium claims, written on paper stolen from the Niger embassy in Rome, were an operation run outside the administration through Michel ‘Cauldron’ Ledeen or a direct White House/CIA operation.

If Suskind is correct this increases the likelihood that both the Atta case and the Niger forgeries were genuine CIA products.

—

Sidenote:
In 2006 Judith Miller Con Coughlin claimed that Iran is training al-Qaeda.

Hi!

We are three hacks and have written this fine op-ed for the Washington Post to tell you that the U.S. housing market is just as fine as the op-ed itself.

Only four states — Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada — have had declines of more than 4 percent in home prices over the past year, according to the house price index of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

Is that not great news? Of course that is completely wrong too, we are hacks after all. The latest release (pdf) of OFHEO data is for May 2008. It says:

Cont. reading: WaPo Housing Hacks

The org-chart of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence includes three country specific mission managers (MM).

Those for North Korea and Iran are somewhat understandable. The one for Cuba eventually too. But why is Venezuela one of them?

Just asking …

As I have not followed the anthrax issue to the depth others did and can not add any insight, I do not plan to write about it.

But you all, if you have not yet done so, should read Greenwald’s writing on it and the media cover up here and here. Emptywheel adds additional aspects.

The case, if ever solved, will go to the core of the Bush/Cheney manipulation machinery.

Please add other sources in the comments.

With the Qatar agreement Lebanon policies are back in balance. Hizbullah has achieve one of its major goals, a veto minority in the cabinet. Another major goal was the acceptance of its military arm as a legitimate entity by the government.

Now that goal seems to have also been achieved:

A ministerial committee agreed Friday on a policy statement draft and referred it to the cabinet for ratification, Information Minister Tareq Mitri said after the body’s 14th session.

…
He said the statement included a clause on the "right of Lebanon, its people, army and resistance to liberate or reclaim its land."

A Hizbollah member of the parliament was a bit more specific:

MP Hassan Fadlallah said Hizbullah’s concept of the cabinet’s policy statement draft is that "the resistance cooperates with the army so that resistance weapons would have the freedom to defend the terrain and resist Israel."

There will be more wrangling about this but the principle of Hizbullah’s right to run a military wing will soon be official Lebanese government policy.

Meanwhile a new round of fighting between Lebanon and Israel is brewing up.

Israel daily violates Lebanese airspace. The Lebanese government and the U.N. forces in Lebanon have filed several complains to no avail. Now Hizbullah has announced to take "practical measures" against future overflights.

The Israelis are concerned that Hizbullah might get anti-aircraft missiles to counter their illegal activities. The disinformation site Debka has for some time alleged that Hizbullah is building radar stations on mountain peaks in Lebanon. Few details are available, but it may well be that Hizbullah is acquiring air defense capabilities.

It would be within the full sovereign rights, and one might argue duty, of the Lebanese government to defend its air space and to give orders to shoot down Israeli drones and fighter planes flying over its territory. As the Lebanese army, thanks to its ‘Western’ sponsors, has zero anti-air capability, the government might delegate that task to the again legitimized resistance, Hizbullah’s military wing.

A downed Israeli pilot in Hizbullah hands could be valuable in regaining Sheba farm area which is still occupied by Israel.

Israel could of course avoid to have its planes attacked over Lebanon. It would simply have to stop its illegal overflights.

Following the Afghan and Indian government, the U.S. accused Pakistan’s intelligence service ISI of facilitating the attack on India’s embassy in Kabul.

The
conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani
intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the
officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani
intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to
combat militants in the region.

That ‘clearest evidence to date’ may be something or not. But I wonder why the U.S. has released this at all. This puts pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government, but what is the expected result of revealing this now?

The Pakistani government can not do anything against ISI, its main intelligence service. Before Giliani recently came to Washington, he ordered the ISI to
be subjugated to the Interior Ministry. The Pakistani military establishment vetoed that move. ISI has a history of resisting civilian influence.

It will continue to operate against India, Afghanistan and the U.S. as long as those three operate against Pakistan’s perceived interest.

Here are good description of Pakistani priorities by McClatchy and from the Globe and Mail:

The ISI, and the Pakistani army it serves, don’t want to see the United States, and the government of Hamid Karzai, win in Afghanistan because they believe it would fatally undermine Pakistan’s own national security, analysts say. The army does not trust U.S. intentions in the region, and it does not trust the Karzai government, which is close to India, Pakistan’s giant and hostile neighbour.

"Nobody in Pakistan wants to see America win," said Hameed Gul, a retired general who is the most infamous former director-general of the ISI. "That would spell danger to Pakistan in the long run. They, America, want to make us subservient to India."

…
The Taliban is merely the tool of a policy aimed at keeping Afghanistan from falling into the hands of Islamabad’s adversaries, as Pakistan would be left sandwiched between two enemy states. This is a military doctrine about national survival, not an ideology of religious fanaticism. Civilians are not welcome to meddle with it.

"If your perception, as the Pakistan army, is that RAW (the Indian intelligence agency) and the CIA are acting in unison, then you try to protect yourself," said Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc. "You do not give them [the Taliban] sufficient room to completely take over Afghanistan but you do enough to stop growing Indian influence."

The nuclear deal the U.S. struck with India, which also undermines the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, has certainly confirmed the Pakistani view.

Some 70 percent of the logistics for the troops in Afghanistan are
landed in Karachi and transported from there through Pakistan and the
Khyber pass, into Afghanistan. The new line of communication that was opened
through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan may help to lower the
dependency on Pakistan. But without Pakistan’s support, the occupation
of Afghanistan will become much more difficult and expensive.

So what is the actual strategy the U.S. has towards Pakistan. Is it hoping to confront it while depending on it?

If the U.S. wants to stay in Afghanistan for long it will have to make a deal with Pakistan. The Pakistani condition for that deal will be less U.S. support for India. The only alternative to this is an outright attack on Pakistan. Is that really in the cards?

Feed MoA.

Post your news, views and comments …

NEW YORK – Wall Street shot higher Tuesday, gaining back the previous session’s sharp losses and then some, after a drop in oil prices and a rise in consumer confidence gave investors some hope for a letup in Americans’ financial woes.
Stocks soar after another drop in oil prices , AP, July 29

NEW YORK – Oil prices are surging, jumping more than $3 a barrel after weak data on U.S. jobs and manufacturing activity led investors to shift money out of stocks and into crude contracts.
Oil prices jump $3 as stocks fall on US jobs data, AP, August 1

In the first piece a drop in oil prices is said to have caused an upward reaction in the stock market. The second piece asserts that movement out of stocks caused an increase in oil prices.

Both arguments are wrong and both pieces include no information that would support the asserted causations. There is simply no direct relation between oil prices and stocks (exception: producing oil companies).

But I seem to stumble more and more over such hapless reporting on economics. I pity the people who make their investment decision based on such.

Two U.S. professors embed with their military in Afghanistan and report on the big success their:

[W]e sat down for the requisite command PowerPoint presentation.

They were able to show that things are better in Afghanistan. Compared with the Taliban era, progress today is in fact staggering. Perhaps the most-revealing gauge is the country’s introduction to the information age: our BlackBerries worked almost everywhere we visited in Afghanistan …

via Joshua Foust who takes the mess apart