The wandering mind of...

One of the most infamous statements that preceded the Bangladesh genocide on 1971 was General Yahya Khan's statement that the resistance in what was then East Pakistan could be dealt with by killing three million.

Interestingly, i've just come across a quote from another murderous military man; Smaïl Lamari, the head of Algeria's secret services during the civil war of 1990s. He also said that he was ready to kill three million Algerians to maintain stability. 

I wonder if it's just a natural number they come to or perhaps there's some sort of military theory behind the statement. I wonder if anything else has been said by others in a similar position. 

Yahya Khan

 "Kill 3 million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands." 

Smaïl Lamari

The Africa at LSE blog posted this up today: The political economic of slums in Africa.

It's an interested article, based on the authors own academic publication, which challenges the notion that the creation of slums is merely as a 'temporary by-product of economic modernisation'. 

The movement of the white British is often characterised as white flight - the indigenous population forced out of their neighbourhoods by foreign migrants. That may be part of the story

The darkies came in and pushed all the white people out of London. Okay, so maybe they pushed some of the white people out of London. Mark Easton's article on the BBC was supposed to explain that the white population of London had actually decreased because sections of the working class had achieved some level of economic success. But what stands out is the fact that he even entertains this tired idea of ethnic minorities forcing out populations.

Please, explain how white people were forced out? They weren't dragged from their homes or run out of neighbourhoods, nor were they made to live some sort of inferior life to their neighbours that forced them elsewhere. 

"obtained or imposed by coercion or physical power."

Assad's e-mails and security documents are now public knowledge.The Guardian and Al Jazeera have both published them and we know that at least the documents from the latter were provided by an defector from the Syrian government. 

Very soon after we heard about a US soldier murdering 16 Afghans in Kandahar last week, a question emerged that was apparently extremely important to answer. That question was who is Robert Bales? Not his name, that will just be the part we need for the history books. But what part of the person made him singlehandedly massacre a group of Afghans? The immediate answer was the he was (probably/possibly/maybe) insane. 

Once that became 'clear' it apparently stop being necessary to ask the other questions - like why did he do it (if it was a breakdown, why kill Afghans instead of Americans?), and how did he walk out of his base on his own, kill 16 people, group them together and burn them?

As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn't know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

I think Robert Fisk got it pretty right there. As he mentions, it has always been easy to defend Western troops by saying they traumatised (or something of that nature) rather than admit that what they had committed was plainly atrocious. Fisk, refers to the Haditha and Cave of the Patriarchs massacres.

Fisk also mentions something that the media had generally ignored. Only weeks ago General John Allen, the US commander in Afghanistan, called on his troops to show discipline by not reacting to the killing of two US soldiers by an Afghan soldier. There clearly was a fear amongst the US hierarchy of some kind of reprisal.

But what's clear to me, and it became even clearer when I spoke to a couple of Afghan students a few days ago, is that the Americans have well and truly lost the 'Battle for Hearts and Minds'. There is no trust left between the Afghans and the Americans. The Afghans feel insulted and insecure, while the US troops are obviously worried about trusting the Afghan soldiers they are training.

It's the Americans i'm worried about though. I'm worried that the blurring of lines between the Afghan army and the Taliban - and the fact that the Talian hide amongst the civilian population - is creating a sense amongst US soldiers that all Afghans are the enemy. Or at least that they can't trust anyone. That reminds me of Vietnam.