Time may not go backwards, but "progress" sure can

Over at the journal Foreign Policy, there is posted a most illuminating collection of photographs. They belong to Mohammad Qayoumi, who grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and 60s, where at least in the capital city some people could aspire to living like other people in the modern world. I suggest you look at these, then hunt around the web for pictures of what Kabul looks like now. Constant warfare can break the back of any local culture, no matter how dominant it may seem. I am sure Afghans in Kabul felt pretty confident when these pictures were taken. Just look at their expressions. Just think about the existence of this portfolio of progress.

An excerpt:

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan...
Record stores, Mad Men furniture, and pencil skirts -- when Kabul had rock 'n' roll, not rockets. View the photos.

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a 1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages.

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and '60s. When I was in middle school, I remember that on one visit to a city market, I bought a photobook about the country published by Afghanistan's planning ministry. Most of the images dated from the 1950s. I had largely forgotten about that book until recently; I left Afghanistan in 1968 on a U.S.-funded scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, and subsequently worked in the Middle East and now the United States. But recently, I decided to seek out another copy. Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country's history didn't mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the truth. Through a colleague, I received a copy of the book and recognized it as a time capsule of the Afghanistan I had once known -- perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials, but a far more realistic picture of my homeland than one often sees today.

Go see these pictures!

Image: Kabul University, biology class.

More on the high seas incident

The Israeli attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza remains the big story. The consequences of this action will roll on for a long time. The are some pieces that casts some light on the situation.

At Brian's Coffeehouse, Brian insists that the interpretation of events not get lost in irrelevant details:

In the wake of yesterday's assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, the most important tactic of Israel's defenders, including the American government, has been to focus on the details of the events which transpired aboard the Mavi Marmara in the early stages of the confrontation. The Israelis argue that their military was pursuing something like peaceful crowd control until they were attacked by activists aboard the ship, and pointing to the two seriously and eight lightly injured soldiers, insist they fired in self-defense.

The Israeli preference, in other words, is to have a discussion about rules of engagement. In attempting to focus the international discussion there, they are also implicitly asking their critics to somewhat carelessly accept the premise that the flotilla represented a force which required a military assault in international waters....

Despite half-baked claims to the contrary, this was not, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed today, "a violent force", and the Israelis have apparently found no weapons to trumpet before the cameras. Instead, they have found a bunch of humanitarian aid which they are allegedly transferring to Gaza themselves. I would love for someone to examine that situation, and determine how much of it was in violation of Israel's draconian blockade of the territory, and consequently how dangerous it can really be if Israel's now just passing it on.

For the real story here is not about a military confrontation at sea, but about an ongoing siege the consequences of which for the Gaza Strip have been well documented elsewhere. If Israel were just checking ships and convoys for weapons and then waving them on, this flotilla would not have existed. The violence yesterday was but an extension of the ongoing violence of siege which does not protect Israel, but makes Gaza into a giant internment camp in which conditions are becoming increasingly desperate. In this context, who did what to whom once the Israeli assault was in progress simply doesn't matter.

Yesterday I saw an American make the point that even Egypt is involved in the blockade of Gaza. As if he saw the same footage, Juan Cole illuminates the difficult position the Egyptian government finds itself in. This is a good introduction to the anomalous position that Palestinians hold in the Arab world:

Although Egypt is widely criticized for mainly keeping the Rafah crossing closed or open only for short periods, Cairo is forced into this arrangement by its peace treaty with Israel and its dependence on the US for $2 billion a year in various sorts of aid.

Were Egypt to defy Israel’s blockade for a long period of time or let in forbidden materials, the Israelis would almost certainly just bomb the entrance. Egypt’s government deeply dislikes having to remain silent in the face of Israeli provocations, as Khalid al-Shami pointed out in Tuesday’s al-Quds al-Arabi. But in fact Egypt could do nothing in the face of such an Israeli military action, being constrained by its treaty obligations and by its close alliance with the USA.

But keeping the border this open holds dangers for Egypt itself. Cairo fears that at some point Israeli foreign minister and leader of the far rightwing Yisrael Beitenu party Avigdor Lieberman will make good on his threats of ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. Egypt is determined that Israel will not resolve its Palestinian problem by expelling them to Egypt as refugees in the Sinai Peninsula. (Likely the Israeli shooting-fish-in-the-barrel war on Gaza in winter 2008-2009 was in part intended to provoke a panicked exodus of Palestinians into the Sinai, but Egyptian military forces prevented any such thing from occurring).

Egypt deeply dislikes the Hamas party/ militia and would not want to be in the position of allowing its influence to spread among bedouin and others in the Sinai region. Such Hamas influences are already blamed for terrorist bombings at Red Sea resorts earlier in this decade.

More to come, undoubtedly.

Image: the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, 2008?

On the high seas

The Israeli attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza has the potential to revolutionize the politics of the Middle East. This is such a big topic that I am tempted to leave it to the experts, advocates and agitators. But keeping in mind past and future students in my Islamic Civilization class, I have decided that I should reproduce here a few posts that touch on points I think are important, notably the relationship/alliance between officially secular Turkey and Israel, and the legality and consequences of the Israeli action.

Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, disagrees that the attack was piracy. The legal position, unless you strongly support the legality of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, is more complicated:

A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.

Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place
on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody's territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.

There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.

Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.

Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.

In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

Over at the US political news site Talkingpointsmemo.com is this comment on relations between Turkey and Israel:

Allies can make up after almost any coming to blows if they want to. But that's the key. This isn't the first blow up in Israel-Turkey relations. Turkish opposition to the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead) has been at the center of the dispute going back to 2008. But even that doesn't really fully explain the decline in relations.

The Israelis, under the foreign ministry headed by the far-right Avigdor Lieberman, have on their side managed to repeatedly snub the Turks over recent months. Sometimes in response to deteriorating relations that both sides played a part in. But other cases seemed like gratuitous and self-destructive provocations by the Israelis. With the political vision of someone like Lieberman, who embodies the ugliest trends in Israeli politics, the alliance with Turkey isn't so much a bridge toward an opening to other Arab or Islamic countries but a distraction or an impediment.

On the other side of the equation though, it's not clear that the AKP government of Turkey, which is probably more accurate to call Islamic-rooted rather than 'Islamist', really wants the alliance with Israel in the first place -- quite apart from the Gaza War or the Flotilla incident. Their roots as a party and their diplomacy have all seemed directed at deepening ties with nearby Islamic countries who in most cases have either cool or downright hostile relations with Israel. And in that context the Turkey-Israel alliance, which has historically run very deep, seems like a liability.

More or less as an American VP said a while ago, this is a big deal. I'll pass on discussing the effects on US foreign and domestic politics; you will soon be able to find an infinity of commentary on those subjects.

Image: The USS Liberty, attacked on the high seas in 1967. A lot of people are bringing that incident up today. Look it up.

The limits of stoicism

Philosopher Nancy Sherman discusses the applicability of the ancient Stoic philosophy for today's warriors, and its limits. An excerpt:

Stockdale’s resilience is legendary in the military. And it remains a living example, too, for philosophers, of how you might put into practice ancient Stoic consolations. But for many in the military, taking up Stoic armor comes at a heavy cost.

In the military, even those who have never laid eyes on a page of Epictetus, still live as if they have. To suck it up is to move beyond grieving and keep fighting.

The Stoic doctrine is essentially about reducing vulnerability. And it starts off where Aristotle leaves off. Aristotle insists that happiness depends to some degree on chance and prosperity. Though the primary component of happiness is virtue — and that, a matter of one’s own discipline and effort — realizing virtue in the world goes beyond one’s effort. Actions that succeed and relationships that endure and are reciprocal depend upon more than one’s own goodness. For the Stoics, this makes happiness far too dicey a matter. And so in their revision, virtue, and virtue alone, is sufficient for happiness. Virtue itself becomes purified, based on reason only, and shorn of ordinary emotions, like fear and grief that cling to objects beyond our control.

In the military, even those who have never laid eyes on a page of Epictetus, still live as if they have. To suck it up is to move beyond grieving and keep fighting; it is to stare death down in a death-saturated place; it is to face one more deployment after two or three or four already. It is hard to imagine a popular philosophy better suited to deprivation and constant subjection to stressors.

And yet in the more than 30 interviews I conducted with soldiers who have returned from the long current wars, what I heard was the wish to let go of the Stoic armor. They wanted to feel and process the loss. They wanted to register the complex inner moral landscape of war by finding some measure of empathy with their own emotions. One retired Army major put it flatly to me, “I’ve been sucking it up for 25 years, and I’m tired of it.” For some, like this officer, the war after the war is unrelenting. It is about psychological trauma and multiple suicide attempts, exacerbated by his own sense of shame in not being the Stoic warrior that he thought he could and should be.

One of the best things about this column is the vigorous and informed debate in the comments.

Back in the Near North!

Medieval landing craft --- see update to bibliography

See here, post and comments.

Medieval landing craft?

The latest Robin Hood movie depicts a French invasion of England using amphibious landing craft that are suspiciously like World War II landing craft. This of course has aroused a certain amount of negative comment. but no one doubts that medieval armies transported warhorses by sea. What did the ships that accomplished this task look like?

Will McLean at A Commonplace Book offers us these two intriguing quotations from primary sources, from only a few years after the supposed landing shown in Robin Hood.
I quote from Will:

[Source quote 1]

Then began the mariners to open the ports of the transports, and let down the bridges, and take out the horses; and the knights began to mount, and they began to marshal the divisions of the host in due order.
Geoffrey de Villehardouin [b.c.1160-d.c.1213]: Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Frank T. Marzials, (London: J.M. Dent, 1908)

[Source quote 2]

So the fleet came to land, and when they were landed, forth came the knights out of the transports, all mounted; for the transports were built in such fashion that they had doors, which were easily opened, and a bridge was thrust out whereby the knights could come forth to land all mounted.

Robert of Clari's account of the Fourth Crusade

[Will himself]

Those sources called the horse transports uissiers. Other names included chelandium, tarida and dromon. They were big galleys capable of carrying 12-30 horses. The big thirty horse taride of Charles I of Sicily shipped 108-110 oars. The doors and ramps were at the stern between two sternposts, so the vessels backed onto the beach to unload and load. They were shallow draft: in Villehardouin's account the knights jumped from the transports into waist-deep water.

Does anyone have more information, textual or graphic, that would shed light on this question?
Will, can you provide a more complete citation on the matter of terminology?

Updated bibliography from various readers:

Martin, Lillian Ray. 2007. Horse and cargo handling on Medieval Mediterranean ships. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Volume 31 Issue 2, Pages 237 - 241.

Bernard S. Bachrach, "On the Origins of William the Conqueror's Horse Transports," Technology and Culture, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1985), pp. 505–531.

See also comments to this post.