One World, Many Peaces

Afghan Taliban 'Code of Conduct' Calls for Immunity, Restraint and Discipline

The Taliban are circulating a 13-chapter code of conduct for their fighters in Afghanistan, requiring them to avoid harming civilians and members of the country’s fragile government. The aim of the slim but significant volume is to win over the “hearts and minds” of the nation, what first the USSR and now the US have tried in vain to do, and the Taliban arguably once did. What is involved in this Islam-based code of military conduct?

Issued by Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, the booklet surprisingly states that fighters must not discriminate as to who has civilian immunity: “The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties…" and "The mujahideen must avoid discrimination based on tribal roots, language or geographic background." However, the code also supports in strictly circumscribing suicide bombings and prisoner exchanges, which must authorized at the highest levels.

The Taliban code belongs to a long global tradition. Two historic codes also condone and control violence. The most famous is European chivalry in the Middle Ages, which mandated that knights do no harm to civilians while ritualizing how they killed each other. The other is the Bushido code of nearly contemporaneous Samurai Japan which did likewise though on different grounds. These and other codes of conduct have yet to be comparatively studied as such.

Both NATO and Afghani officials were quick to denounce the code as propaganda masking a vicious and disorganized enemy. If they instead used it as an overture for normalizing relations with their enemies, peace may come sooner. Of course, had Taliban fighters been acting as the code prescribed, there would be no impetus to issue it. Still, one step towards peace is better than no step toward peace.

Even if, as the UK’s Telegraph South Asia Editor Dean Nelson suggests, the aim of the code is to assert the dominance of Omar’s faction over semi-autonomous others, their willingness to curb the use of violence is commendable. Perhaps it should even be circulated more widely by NATO as misinformation, assuming of course that it isn't to begin with. Doing so could turn out to be two steps forward and no step back.

These literary efforts on the part of Taliban leaders to restrain and discipline fighters in the hopes of limiting civilian and other causalities seems to me to be quite in line with what NATO is there to do, aside from killing them. Now that it has been issued, however, it remains to be seen to what extent the code is adhered to as a current event creating the future of Afghanistan.

China and Taiwan in Historic First Dialogue Offer New Diplomatic Model

The first official, direct dialogue between China and Taiwan took place yesterday in the shadows of the US-China summit, which perhaps purposefully drew much more media attention. Sixty years after civil war between the nationalists who escaped to the island and the communists who took over the mainland, their leaders urged lasting peace in a stunningly strategic diplomatic maneuver.

To navigate around the hot-button issue of Taiwanese sovereignty, the leaders exchanged direct messages not as heads of state, but as party leaders. China's Hu Jintao sought to "continue to promote peaceful development in cross-strait relations." In response, Taiwan's Ma Ying-jeou urged ongoing "efforts to consolidate peace" and regional stability. China still claims the island of Taiwan, while its government is otherwise sovereign. Improved indirect relations recently set the stage for this breakthrough.

The brevity of their telegraphs is made up for by billions of dollars of trade between them as China's government shifts the country to a more consumer society. Meanwhile, Taiwan needs new markets for its prized electronic, computer and other goods as the U.S. Economic slowdown continues. The direct dialogue also calls into question the need for U.S. or other mediators, a given previously.

This delicate new mode of international interaction can now serve as a model for how other, similarly-situated countries can spark a conversation more conducive to peace than stubborn silence. Like Taiwan, South Korea is staunchly capitalist and democratic. Like China, North Korea is committed to communism, at least politically. Were the two Koreas to take their cue from this first contact, their differences would seem equally surmountable.

The unprecedented willingness of nations to reach across ideological lines and chasms between economic systems formerly considered too deep to meet is a tricky but promising current event. The future such willingness suggests is one in which compulsory conformity is replaced with pragmatic respect for differences, or “one world, many peaces.”

Oil for Peace Works in Sudan, but How?

The precarious peace between Sudan’s government-controlled north backed by Arab tribes and the semi-autonomous south controlled by rebel Black tribes overcame a major challenge yesterday when oil-rich lands between them were divided equitably according to each. 

The settlement, acclaimed by both sides and their supporters, is also another major victory for the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, Netherlands. Presiding arbitrator Pierre-Marie Dupuy and the parties involved deserve Nobel Peace Prize nomination. With billions of dollars, millions of lives, thousands of jobs, hundreds of negotiators and decades of civil war in the balance, two questions remain: Will it last? And is this a peacemaking and keeping model applicable elsewhere in Sudan and others hot spots around the world?

A year ago, the Abyei region and its villages were engulfed in a brutal battle between the Arab Misseriah tribe of the north and the southern Black Dinka tribe. The two tribes, with their governments backing, then sought peace through settling territorial claims (including coveted oil lands) at The Hague. Now provisionally secured, many Sudanese and outsiders are pushing for the same peacemaking model to be applied in the country's northwest region, Darfur.

That The Hague, originally intended as an inter-national court, is effectively being used for settling intra-national disputes is nothing short of astonishing. If only war crimes courts were likewise. What is still needed, however, is an extra-national arbitration system for intra-national disputes that takes a proactive rather than reactive approach. For now, the oil for peace strategy working in Sudan is a promising current event opening up new possibilities for the future.

F-22 Debate Shadows U.S. Military Buildup in Columbia

Below the media's military radar now constantly scanning two major warzones, Iraq and Afghanistan, and several other ongoing hotspots ranging from Iran to North Korea, the U.S.' military buildup in Columbia is for the most part going unnoticed. Ostensibly to "train" native forces (a vague euphemism quickly getting old) to combat drug-funded leftist guerillas in a longstanding conflict with the government, the pending increase in American personnel and equipment did not go unnoticed by neighboring Venezuela's leader and among the most acrimoniously anti-American, Hugo Chavez.

Could this be a cover for future military action, or at least military hedging, against Venezuela, say if the so far cordial relationship between Obama and Chavez becomes bitter, i.e even more than it was with Bush? While Obama and his team are touting a victory in halting the production of seven F-22 bombers (while allocating the resources to make other if smaller military planes), few are paying attention to the fact that over $4 billion in military and other aid has been given by the U.S. to Columbia since 2000, with 1,400 service personnel and military contractors mandated by the U.S. Congress. The fifth round of U.S.-Columbia negotiations, intended to close the buildup deal, are set for next week.

Columbia's President Alvaro Uribe insists that the increase in U.S. military presence at two of his country's bases are meant to support them, not to open new ones under American jurisdiction. Considering the widening and deepening worldwide military presence of the U.S. armed forces since World War Two, from Japan to Germany and the Earth's two poles, this move shouldn't come as such a surprise, which makes it all the more shocking. With some wounds still unhealed between Columbia and Venezuela, the U.S. may be imprecating itself into another quagmire current event creating the future.

Realigning the Non-Aligned Movement for Real Change: Lessons from Egypt

The Non-Aligned Movement of over 115 nations was once a historically unique and periodically powerful vehicle in which the weakest and poorest could stand up to the superpowers, then the US and USSR, and their ideological clubs. Their two-day summit in Egypt wrapping up makes clear not only that the non-aligned need to realign themselves vis-à-vis each other and the post-Cold War world. Above all, the summit’s important if limited outcomes showed why they should and how the world would benefit.

The Non-Aligned Movement was a pragmatic proponent of peace and prosperity worldwide when the world was at the brink of nuclear annihilation and economic turmoil. Bringing together countries of all political creeds, it became a United Nations power bloc which paved the way towards decolonization and development in what, correspondingly, became known as the Third World. In that tradition, within its forum, two nuclear powers with serious grievances against each other (Pakistan and India) pledged to cooperate against terrorists. The group’s reaching out to China again points to another ongoing global realignment.

Raul Castro's vague proclamations on Cuba's support for a new economic order harkens back to when the World Bank and IMF were formed in response to demands by the Non-Aligned Movement for a more equitable global economic system, which have since failed it. The stalled Doha economic talks are a strong echo of the Non-Aligned position. The G8 was a response to a now defunct economic arm of the Non-Aligned, the G88, and OPEC was an offshoot. The world would lose a piece of itself if the Non-Aligned Movement were to come to a halt: an alternative world system based on the principles of diversity and unity (note: One World, Many Peaces).

With renewed citizen involvement, with skilled and pragmatic leadership along the lines of its founders (Nehru, Tito, and Sadat); with support from other associations of nations such as the Organization of American States, the European Union and the African Union; with a total internal reorganization and specific strategies tied to tangible goals, and of course with a new name, the Non-Aligned Movement could become one of the world’s premier and powerful vehicles of peace and prosperity once again. For the Non-Aligned Movement to remain a current event, it must realign itself in the present for the future.