Nicolas Henin, a reporter’s blog

I just produced this report, aired by the German-French channel Arte, after a week in Tarmiya, North of Baghdad (you can watch the French version here).

It shows how much the American military relies now on local tribal militias in the sunni areas.

I was lucky to attend the capture of two Al-Qaeda suspects.

The local boss of the Sons of Iraq militia was jailed for almost a year, charged with corruption and funding the insurgency. But because no one in town was more pertinent to deal with, nor less corrupted, the US eventually freed him…

An example for the future Iraq!

Thanks to Alain Gresh’s blog, I read the editorial of the Lebanese Daily Star daily, dated 14th of Feb. It was published after the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh.

It is interesting to notice that this newspaper, being read mainly among the Sunni and Christian communities in Lebanon, is rather close to the Western position.

I’m not trying to advocate any crime or defend any violent action (and this article does not either) but one must recall the local context before issuing quick judgments.

Here is an extract :

‘Whether one chooses to condemn or praise Mughniyeh, it is worth recalling the context in which he arose to become one of the most wanted men in the world. Mughniyeh had not yet been born in 1948, when Israeli forces entered Lebanon and killed dozens of civilians in the village of Hula, and he was just a toddler when the Jewish state sent commandos to Beirut International Airport to blow up 13 passenger planes. During Mughniyeh’s childhood and early adolescence, Israel systematically destroyed dozens of Muslim, Christian and Druze villages in Lebanon, making much of the South of the country uninhabitable and forcing scores of civilians to flee from their ancestral homes to the southern suburbs of Beirut. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Mughniyeh’s response to the criminal brutality that he witnessed in his formative years, one cannot deny the role that these events played in making him the man that he eventually became: Mughniyeh, like Hizbullah itself, arose as a direct response to Israeli aggression.’

The American counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan costs the US tax payers one billion dollars a year. But, according to the former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke (read his column in the Washington Post here - you need to register), it may be «the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy.»

Ineffective ? Not only. This program is even counter-productive.

«It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan», Holbrooke says.
According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. The evidence, for the former diplomat, of the failure of this program.

«The program destroys crops in insecure areas, especially in the south, where the Taliban is strongest. This policy pushes farmers with no other source of livelihood into the arms of the Taliban without reducing the total amount of opium being produced. Meanwhile, there is far too little effort made against the drug lords and high-ranking government officials who are at the heart of the huge drug trade in Afghanistan — probably the largest single-country drug production since 19th-century China (‘liberated’ Afghanistan has virtually been turned to a narco-state, producing 90% of the world’s opium, I precise) — whose dollar value equals about 50 percent of the country’s official gross domestic product. There is a direct correlation between opium production and security », he says.

Despite this, very few allies of the US in Afghanistan dare to give them any piece of advice and France is likely about to announce an increase of its military deployment.

President Sarkozy’s visit to the Gulf ended with the announcement that France will set up a new base in the UAE (a couple of other agreements were signed, including cooperation for a water plant and a civilian nuclear cooperation program).

This is a breaking news.

First, it makes France become the only other foreign country with the US to have a permanent military facility in the Gulf region. And this happens as France has not extended its military bases network abroad recently - the trend is rather to downsize it, due to budget considerations. In Abu Dhabi, four to five hundreds French soldiers will be deployed on a long run.
Second, France did its best to avoid ambiguity. It claimed that this base is not aimed at Iran. And it claimed that the Emirates asked for it –France could’nt frankly say anything else.

This decision may be a major strategic mistake.

The French national interests are in a stable Middle-East. Deploying more troops can only bring more tensions. And the image of France in the region could be serioulsy damaged by such a decision. The recent trend shows that the ‘autonomists’ (ranking first among them are the islamists) are pledging for less Western influence in the region

What if, latter, this military presence is perceived as an occupation ? How would the French soldiers react if they get attacked ? A retreat would be seen as a defeat. A retaliation would trigger a dangerous cycle.

There are certainly many possible solutions to face terrorism. Deploying more Western troops on a muslim soil can definitely not be one of them.