Columnist article

May 13, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control. If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today. No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income. The tough, no nonsense, eradication programme has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot. Both the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and the wise senior statesman and former finance minister Sartaj...

LONDON – Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control.If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today.No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income. The tough, no nonsense, eradication programme has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot. Both the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and the wise senior statesman and former finance minister Sartaj Aziz, who probably knows more about the economics...

LONDON – Igor Yurgens is probably as close to Dmitri Medvedev as one can get without interviewing the president himself. His influence is regarded by those who follow the inner workings of the Kremlin as immense. By disposition a liberal academic, committed to the rule of law, he runs his own think tank which gives him the research and intellectual firepower to influence his close friend. Yurgens had something to do with clearing the path for the president to give his first on the record interview to the remarkably brave and independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, whose star reporters, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been gunned down. I recently interviewed Yurgens and we talked about Georgia, where the Russian army last August defeated the Georgian forces which had precipitated an unnecessary war by invading its neighbour, the pro-Russian mini state of South Ossetia.I’ve long maintained that although Russia was acting within its...

LONDON – Of all the words said and written about torture in the current debate very few has bothered to look up the history of the birth in 1984 of the UN’s Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Much of the groundwork was done by Amnesty International. Among countries who put their shoulder to the wheel, the Scandinavians and the Dutch worked harder than anyone else. But not far behind them was the U.S., whose president at that time was the grand conservative, Ronald Reagan, who had no trouble in persuading Congress to ratify the Treaty. His fellow conservative, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, also whisked it through the House of Commons in quick time. ‘Those were the days’, you might say. No one in the public debate, to my knowledge, has looked up the words of the Treaty itself. They are stronger...

LONDON – A fifty percent reduction in the nuclear weapons’ arsenal of Russia and the U.S. was proposed by President Barack Obama this past weekend. President Dmitry Medvedev seems to be receptive. What neither have mentioned is that we have been here before – with presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. But the plan was undermined by a key advisor on the American side and short sightedness on the Soviet side. Although Russia and the U.S. keep their missiles on hair trigger alert, there is almost nobody in the higher reaches of policy making on either side who thinks they would ever be used. Indeed, this has been so for years. Doubts about reason for the vast number of nuclear weapons in America’s stockpile go back a long way. President Dwight Eisenhower, the former Second World War commander in chief, observed that, “military statements of nuclear weapons requirements were grossly...

LONDON – “We must have an exit strategy”, said President Barack Obama on television yesterday. But what about an entry strategy, or should we say, after seven years of steadily losing the war in Afghanistan a re-entry strategy? In a month’s time Obama will descend on NATO at its Brussels HQ and demand that the Europeans help out. Well before then, Obama will have on his desk the interagency review of policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan that he has requested. We should be able to guess its bias, if not every details of its contents. It is being chaired by Bruce Riedel. He is a former CIA officer and a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues. We know his views (and they are easily accessible on the Brookings website). My first reaction on reading them is why on earth didn’t Obama give the job to his...

LONDON – When two years ago I talked about the Taliban to the now fallen military president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, and suggested he talk to them more and fight them less he reacted as if the thought had never passed through his head before. “Well, I have never thought of doing that, but you have given me a good idea!”, he said, suddenly sitting up in his chair. David Goodhart, the editor at Prospect magazine for whom I often write, dryly observed that Musharraf was trying to flatter a rather naive journalist. Thank you David, but in my naivete, after over 40 years of being a foreign correspondent, I didn’t read it that way! And now, the last six months, as the Taliban seem to be winning the war, everyone – Americans, NATO commanders and ambassadors on the spot and, not least, the Pakistanis – are falling over themselves to...

Bush decided unilaterally to de-alert all bombers, 450 of the deadly accurate city-destroying Minuteman missiles and the missiles in 10 Poseidon submarines (enough with one launch to destroy Moscow, Leningrad and every city in between). Gorbachev, taking the cue, deactivated 500 land-based nuclear-tipped missiles and six submarines (enough in total to reduce the most populated parts of the U.S. to ashes and dust). Moreover, this wasn’t the cosmetic de-alerting talked about today. Silo and submarine crews actually had their launch keys taken away from them. This is why President Barack Obama (if the New York Times has got the story right) has made a big mistake in his opening move following the pressing of the famous “reset button”. His letter to President Dimitri Medvedev, suggesting that the U.S. was open to discussion on the dismantling of the anti-missile site now being constructed on Polish soil if Russia would lean harder...

, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taliban, who in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden. In 1986 I visited Peshawar in north east Pakistan, close to the Khyber pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs – Pathan chiefs who had escaped with their people from the war in Afghanistan had built huge well defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality that Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pathans was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism. The Americans and the Saudis were engaged at that time in bolstering these Pathans with money and weapons to fight the Red Army. All of it was funded through Pakistan’s notorious secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate....

January 27, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – It is rapidly becoming a truism that all the Middle East problems are so intertwined that they must be all negotiated into tolerance and disarmament at more or less the same time – not sequentially as before. Still, it is better in an analysis such as this to single out Iran, because if Iran can be got right then a lot of the other dominoes will be easier to fit into place. It is Iran that Israel fears most. It is Iran that has much influence on Hamas. It is Iran that can contribute significantly to peace in Iraq and the Lebanon. And to discuss Iran we must talk about Libya. Libya only a few years ago had many of the same problems as Iran tod ay. Not only was it on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons it was a terrorist state...

he penned an article in Foreign Affairs which caused almost as much shock as his previous “The Clash of Civilizations”. “In the past few years the U.S. has attempted unilaterally to do the following: prevent other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority; enforce American law extra territorially in other societies; grade countries according to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and religious freedom; apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve the same corporate interests; intervene in local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; bludgeon other countries to adopt economic and social policies that will benefit American economic interests; promote American arms sales abroad; expand NATO; and categorize certain countries as...

allowing the prosecution of citizens who commit torture overseas. (Taylor was born in the U.S. But then moved to Liberia to join his father.) Is there now one law in America for those who commit torture overseas and those who commit it at home with the authority of government? Perhaps for not much longer. In a television interview last weekend President-elect Barack Obama said that the attorney general would investigate whether some senior members of the Bush administration should be prosecuted for their part in torture, although he said that his belief was that “what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future”. Also last week he said that he had given his new appointees to top intelligence positions a clear charge to restore the U.S.’s stance of human rights. “Under my administration the United States does not torture.” Obama should also have reminded his audience...