From RIA-Novosti:

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) will conduct joint military exercises in August-September in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, the Belarusian defense minister said on Wednesday.

The defense ministers of the post-Soviet security bloc comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan held a regular meeting in Moscow on June 3.

"The joint drills will be held in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus to practice the deployment of CSTO's joint rapid-reaction force," Leonid Maltsev told reporters after the meeting.

He said the exercises in Belarus will also involve the Russia-Belarus joint military grouping created within the framework of the CSTO.

According to media reports, Russia is planning to build a strong military contingent in Central Asia within the CSTO comparable to NATO forces in Europe.

Russia was highly irritated by 19-country NATO war games held in Georgia last month. Interestingly, Kazakhstan, where part the CSTO drills are to take place, was one of the countries invited to participate in the NATO exercises but declined in solidarity with Russia.

The exercises in Belarus, right on NATO's eastern border, are likely to be seen as a response to NATO's actions in Georgia.

This seems too good to be true, but for what it's worth, Canadian defence reporter Dave Pugliese passes along a report that the planned sale of Russian nuclear submarines to Venezuela was scuppered after Hugo Chavez's bodyguards mixed it up with some Russian sailors:

 

...the KILOs (the subs) destined for Vietnam were originally to be purchased by Venezuela but that deal collapsed after a fistfight on board the Russian cruiser “Peter the Great” when it and other warships were visiting Venezuela.

Venezuela’s leader Chavez was in the process of visiting the Russian flotilla but his bodyguards were prevented from boarding. A fistfight then broke out between the Russian sailors and the bodyguards. The nose of one Russian was broken.

That ended the sub purchase.

Robert Farley notes that the deal is indeed off, and it's certainly not out of the question that the fight took place. But it's likely that the bigger reason Chavez balked at the deal is that his government is low on oil money these days. 

THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images

News today that Ireland has banned its troops in Chad from playing soccer hits particularly close for me. You see, I was reporting from Chad about a year ago -- and by coincidence, I stayed in the same hotel as the initial forces for the EU peacekeeping force now deployed there. So I have to say that I agree with Irish Defence Minister Willie O’Dea:

The reality in Chad is that the ground is extremely hard. Some of the sports are played out on open ground and when people fall, it tends to have a much greater impact on their bodies than falling in a field in Ireland, where the ground is not nearly as hard"

All true. My running took a serious hit during my stay in N'Djamena (though I had always attributed this more to the fact that a rebel incursion had shut down the city streets. Not really ideal conditions.)

Come to think of it, Chad is a pretty dangerous place for sports. Alas, the dirt in the country is hard. Minister O'Dea could also have cited concerns about dust -- since you would have to shower 5 times a day not to end up covered in silt. Not good for the health of ones eyes. The hotel pool by which many of the EU soldiers reclined was a breeding ground for mosquitoes (read: malaria). 

Of course, the good news it that less soccer, pool, running, and general revelry might leave more time for the business of peacekeeping. But watch out -- those rebels are hardly better for one's constitution.

The U.S. military today denied the allegation made in this Al Jazeera piece that evangelical chaplains are urging U.S. toops in Afghanistan to protelytize for Christianity:

The reporting here does seem a little dodgy. The piece implies that this line from a U.S chaplain's sermon is a violation of U.S. policy:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."

But it's not at all clear that this refers to converting Afghans and this seems like a line that one could hear in any evangelical sermon in the United States. None of the officers "caught on camera" in the segment ever actually instruct troops to proselytize, in fact the only discussion of the practice is about how it's against military rules. 

As for the bibles in Dari and Pashto, the conversations in the video actually seem to better support the military's explanation that a soldier had "showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them."

Afghanistan's former prime minister has called for an investigation after seeing the segment. This is a serious issue and one that has gotten the military into trouble before. But without more evidence, this particular case seems like a manufactured controversy.

Earlier today, I spoke with veteran Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. My question was simple: At what point did it become clear that the United States' treatment of detainees in overseas prisons was harsh, and possibly illegal? (For more FP torture coverage, see here.)

Allegations of detainee abuse first started trickling out in January 2002 -- in essence, as soon as detainees came into U.S. custody. But it wasn't until eleven months later that Priest and fellow Post reporter Barton Gellman wrote the first definitive account of such abuse. On the day after Christmas, 2002, the Post described "stress and duress" tactics, extraordinary rendition to countries like Syria, and the harsh treatment of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda. The article used the word torture -- saying that the United States harshly interrogated prisoners, and sent them to foreign prisons to gain the "fruits" of torture without having to do it themselves.

According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."

Back then, the CIA was Priest's beat. She says her tip-off on the "stress and duress" story came when she noticed a separate, unmarked compound near the main Bagram holding facility. "It wasn't in the military compound," she says. "But it was surrounded with triple concertina wire," the type used in high-security prisons. "I thought -- they have a separate facility, so are they working under separate rules? I knew the CIA and military were working in teams together, but at what?"

She and a team of Post reporters, among them Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Barton Gellman, working in parallel and in competition to New York Times writers like Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall, started piecing the stories together. "Really, there were just a handful of reporters who could make inroads on the subject," she says.

The reporting was painstaking. "It was a very decentralized thing. You weren't even sure what the questions were," she says. "We couldn't connect it up. We couldn't see the big picture. And there was no past reporting to go on. Everyone was making it up. We'd follow these little reports from Afghanistan, about people disappearing. That was it."

Crucial to the success of the early reporting were the teams of lawyers at organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights struggling to glean information on detainees. "We were all getting little teeny scraps and putting it together painstakingly," she says. "Nobody told you the whole story, or even a quarter of a story." One Post article on an extraordinary rendition came together because a someone happened to write down the number on the tail of an airplane. "You needed to keep those little scraps in your head," Priest notes.

Another big break -- for which she won a Pulitzer Prize -- came when she completed a story about the black sites, secret overseas prisons. The story took more than two years to report, and, she says, reporting on the subject still didn't get much easier -- it took years for Congress to devote as much attention to it as reporters and defense lawyers were.

"Congress did nothing," she says, "until political winds had changed, and the Democrats were feeling a little more at ease in the world. It's a new feeling for them. Because, before, there were Democrats in those meetings saying, ‘Do what you've got to do.'"

Alex Wong/Getty Images

By Mark Leon Goldberg

Hi Passport readers. I write the U.N. and global affairs blog UN Dispatch. The good folks at Passport asked me to respond to Matthew Russell Lee's selective lobotomy of U.N. Secretariat offices and functions.

Matthew and I have history. Every other week for the past two years we have sparred on BloggingHeads about U.N. issues and foreign policy more generally. I'm sure we'll take this beef to the airwaves this weekend when our program goes online. For now, though, it's to the keyboard. And in the interest of brevity, I'll limit my response to Matthew's recommendation that the U.N.'s Ethics Office be abolished in favor of a new "Office of Discipline" in order to punish miscreant peacekeepers.

As Passport's own Elizabeth Dickinson documents so elegantly in the current dead-tree version of Foreign Policy, there are over 100,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries deployed to 19 missions around the world. The vast majority of peacekeepers conduct themselves professionally, but there have been instances in which peacekeeper impropriety has threatened to undermine the credibility of the U.N. in the eyes of the population that it is meant to serve. This is serious problem-and it is taken seriously at the UN. (See, this 2005 report Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, the Permanent Representative from Jordan and a former civilian peacekeeper himself.)

There are, however, certain structural problems in dealing with peacekeeper accountability that go beyond setting up or dismantling offices at U.N. headquarters.

For example, when a U.S. Marine is accused of misconduct he or she is subject to Courts Martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The United Nations does not have a similar capacity to pursue criminal investigations against peacekeepers; there are no criminal prosecutors in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations nor are there judges, courts or prisons. Rather, when a peacekeeper is accused of misconduct, the most the U.N. Secretariat can do is send him or her home. It is the responsibility of the troop contributing countries to launch the criminal probes.

This is clearly problematic because it leaves open the possibility that peacekeepers accused of a crime may go unpunished once sent home. However, since 2007 the United Nations has used inserted provisions in Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) between troop contributing countries and the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations that compel the troop contributing country to treat the prosecution of repatriated peacekeepers as it would should a similar offense occur in its territory.

This is a welcome development, but the question of what to do should a troop contributing country violate this provision of the MOU remains. Should the UN summarily reject peacekeepers from countries that do not follow the letter of this MOU? If so, whole peacekeeping missions in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, and Haiti could threaten to fold should, say, Pakistan fail to prosecute a small handful of its approximately 11,000 blue helmets in the field. I would argue that this is a worse outcome than having a relatively few number of peacekeepers go unpunished.

What to do about civilians accused of misconduct on a peacekeeping mission is an even more difficult nut to crack. Many times, civilians operate under diplomatic immunity. Immunity can be waived by the Secretary General but then there is the problem of jurisdiction. Under what penal code should civilians be subject? Generally, an individual would be tried where the crime occurs. But peacekeeping missions are often in countries without a functioning judiciary or without one that is up to international standards.

The aforementioned Zeid Report recommends a number of ways in which this accountability gap can be closed. The most straightforward of these is setting up a new "convention on the criminal accountability of United Nations officials and experts on mission," which spells out how nationals of states that are party to this convention could be criminally prosecuted.

A draft text of this convention exists, but has not yet been adopted by UN member states. And even if this convention were adopted, only nationals of countries that have ratified the convention would be subject to its jurisdiction. Does that mean the U.N. should prohibit civilians from states that are not party to the convention from participating in peacekeeping missions? Again, such a rule would prevent a number of civilian experts from lending their skills and expertise to peacekeeping operations.

The point is these are complex issues that cannot, contra Matthew, be fixed simply by abolishing the Ethics Office and setting up a new "Disciplinary Office." Rather, U.N. member states - not the UN Secretariat itself - must to take the initiative.

Like I said, stay tuned for a longer discussion about this and the other issues Matthew raises on BloggingHeads. Our diavlog will be posted on Sunday.

I asked Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch and a former Clinton administration official, to work through some of the foreign policy implications of the newly released torture memos with me.

We discussed whether the Bush administration memos encouraged other countries to torture, or led to any global uptick in "enhanced interrogation" practices. "I've always tried to be careful not to suggest that countries like Egypt or China or Uzbekistan would be torturing more because the United States was setting a bad example. Obviously, dictatorships torture for their own reasons, and they didn't need [former U.S. President] George W. Bush to show them how," he says.

But, the Bush administration torture of detainees and disavowal of the Geneva Conventions did preclude diplomacy on many occasions, Malinowski says. He testified before the Helsinki Commission in 2007 to make the point:

A couple of years ago, Human Rights Watch was meeting with the Prime Minister of Egypt, and we raised a case in which hundreds of prisoners rounded up after a terrorist bombing were tortured by Egyptian security forces.   The Prime Minister didn't deny the charge.  He answered, "We're just doing what the United States does."  We've had Guantanamo and the administration's interrogation policies thrown back in our face in meetings with officials from many other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and Lebanon.  U.S. diplomats have told us they face the same problem.  A U.S. ambassador to a leading Middle Eastern country, for example, has told us that he can no longer raise the issue of torture in that country as a result. 

Malinowski says the detainee abuse made it difficult for the White House to negotiate any human rights provisions or issues, broadly. "Issues beyond torture were effected, because it enabled authoritarian governments to say, ‘You have no right to lecture us,'" he says. "They were delighted to tweak the United States on it."

The biggest offender? Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who Malinowski described as a "world champion" of chiding the United States via its own policies.

Nevertheless, Malinowski thinks that, despite the horrible details revealed by the Bush administration and International Committee of the Red Cross memos, ultimately their release is a very good thing for the Obama administration.

[Obama] can go to a country like Turkey or Indonesia or Egypt and say, "Look, I know what it's like to face real security threats, and we as Americans understand the temptation to give up some of our liberties and principles to defend ourselves against those threats. But what we've learned the hard way in the last eight years is that those liberties and principles actually make us stronger. You could learn from our example."

That's a much more effective way of arguing the point than going to those same countries and saying, look at our perfect system and our glorious morality, and maybe someday you can be as good as we are. So I think if he uses the experience as a cautionary tale, it will actually make our country a more effective and compelling champion of human rights around the world, ironically.

Here's to hoping so.

Photo: Entrance to Bagram Air Base by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It's been a tense day for constitutional lawyers, national security reporters, and foreign policy wonks. Why? This afternoon, the Obama administration intends to release memos relating to the controversial "enhanced interrogation" policies of CIA officers in overseas prisons.

There have been careful negotiations between the CIA, Justice Department, and White House over the contents of the release, and it seems the officers involved have been granted immunity from prosecution as a result. 

The full set of documents should be released here sometime within the hour. 

Update: The only redactions are the officers' names. 

Update: Read the memos here. 

Sen. Russell Feingold sent an interesting letter to Barack Obama about Somalia yesterday, cc-ing Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and Dennis Blair. The senator, a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, urged the U.S. president to engage Somalia, but carefully: work with the Somali government; improve support for the country's internal security apparatus. No quick fixes here:

[There is an] essential need to develop a comprehensive interagency strategy to stabilize Somalia and support effective governance. With the strategic review now underway, I reiterate my belief that expanded U.S. support for the new unity government must be a central component of that strategy. Furthermore, we must seize the opening that lies before us by publicly declaring our commitment to high-level, sustained engagement that could help Somalia overcome the many challenges to peace and stability."

Feingold proposes stronger U.S. engagement with the Somali government -- not only to stamp out piracy but to "establish security and functional, inclusive governance within the country." Obama, he suggests, should start by calling Somali President Sheikh Sharif. 

Most interesting of all, though, is Feingold's reference to the last time that piracy was notably halted in Somalia -- under the Islamic Courts Union in 2006. That regime, later ousted by Ethiopian troops (with U.S. support...) brought the only calm to the seas that the country has seen in recent years. 

The ultimate solution to the problem of piracy, then, is the establishment of a functional government that can enforce the rule of law. During the rule of the Council of Islamic Courts in 2006, there was a notable decline in piracy that can be attributed, in large part, to the rise of a central authority in southern Somalia.
Without replicating the repressive rule of the Courts, we must keep in mind that establishing a central governing structure in Somalia is critical to resolving, not just stopping, the problem of piracy."

Now that's an idea, unlike airstrikes, that I feel militantly supportive of. 

The war cries to bring down Somali pirates are deafening this morning (Obama has promised to do so), but none more alarming than this report from Bloomberg:

The U.S. military is considering attacks on pirate bases on land and aid for the Somali people to help stem ship hijackings off Africa’s east coast, defense officials said.

Does the United States know what they're getting into? Piracy experts have long suggested that the root of the problem is indeed on land. But air strikes on Somali bases would be dangerously close to a U.S. military operation in Somalia -- the kind that the country has avoided since Blackhawk down in 1994.

Let's think hypothetically about what might happen if strikes go ahead. U.S. onland intervention will surely anger al Shabaab, the Islamist militant wing that controls an alarming percentage of Somali territory and is the biggest single threat to Somali stability. Already, the Somali government is struggling to convince the country that its relatively pro-Western stance is for the greater good. That argument will lose all weight if and when the U.S. starts airstrikes. Forget about the government's effectiveness, and forget about any hopes that al Shabaab will disarm. This would fuel the fire. No, we shouldn't kneel to the demands of al Shabaab, but nor should we ignore that their ire will be taken out on the already dilapidated Somali population. 

Talk about an escalation.

To be fair, the rumored U.S. plans includes the creation of a Somali coast guard, and support for the Somali government. U.S. Congressman Donald Payne, long a Somalia pragmatist, made a daring visit to Mogadishu today to talk about how the U.S. can help the Somalis fight piracy. But the fact that his plane was shot at only proves how difficult a situation we are walking into.

If we have learned anything about Somali over the last two decades, surely it is that military escalation (this one included) will inevitably breed more chaos. And if we have learned anything about the pirates, it is that chaos on land breeds impunity at sea.

Photo: MOHAMED DAHIR/AFP/Getty Images

 

There's a lot of competition for top crises these days -- what with Somali pirates going overboard, Pakistan and Afghansitan looking increasingly perilous, Mexico's chaos scarily peering over the border... 

But I vote for adding Nigeria to that very pressing list of concerns.

A new report released today, puts last year's death toll from unrest in the oil-producing Niger Delta region at 1,000. The almost-guerrilla war dragged the economy down by $20.7 billion in lost oil revenue, with little sign of abating in 2009. With oil prices already lower, government revenues are falling. More worrisome -- the rebels in that region who earn most of their cash from oil bunkering will be short on dough, inspiring more of the kidnappings-for-ransom that already breached the 300 mark in 2008. NGO workers on the ground tell me that things will really heat up if the prices (or the oil production levels) drop much lower.

To add another twist, the main rebel group in the region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), today e-mailed a statement rejecting an amnesty offer that members of the ruling party allegedly proposed. In classic form, the rejection is colorful: 

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta rejects this evil agenda by the [ruling party] PDP and its cohorts and vow never to sell our birth right [to Nigeria's oil] for a bowl of porridge."

The deal itself was even more interesting: the government would provide fighter amnesty, prisoner release, and huge payouts to MEND in exchange for a rebel promise to help rig the coming elections in favor of the ruling party. That offer may well be an exaggeration on the part of the rebel spokesman. Then again, given Nigeria's rather wretched election history... it might not.

Why should this mess end up in the top echelon of global worries? Don't forget: Nigeria is the third largest oil supplier to the United States. And when regional powerhouses go down in flames, it can't bode well for any of the unlucky neighbors -- many of whom are recovering from their own bouts of conflict. 

Did I mention that the country's president might be dying? With that, you have it -- my Axis of Upheaval nomination: Nigeria. 

PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP

Somehow I don't think this suggestion from Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is going to go very far:

"I cannot condone violations of our sovereignty even when they are done by allies and friends. We would much prefer that the US share its intelligence and give us the drones and missiles that will allow us to take care of this problem on our own." 

Der Spiegel is reporting that a raid by U.S. Delta Force commandos in Northern Afghanistan this month was set up by an Afghan drug clan to eliminate a rival:

The Americans stormed a guesthouse belonging to the local mayor, who had previously been friendly towards German forces, killing his driver, cook and bodyguard, as well as two of his guests. The US commandos also seized four people. According to the US military, one of those captured was the "target" of the operation, a "high-ranking" member of the terrorist organization al-Qaida.

However, sources in the intelligence community have told SPIEGEL that the US forces were apparently used by a drug clan to take out one of its rivals, who was reportedly one of the men who was killed or detained. The tip-off regarding the location of the al-Qaida terrorist had come from a source close to a member of the Afghan government in Kabul who is reputed to be deeply involved with the illegal drugs trade in Afghanistan.

The German forces who operate in the area are now furious that they're being blamed for the incident. 

With a NATO summit being held later this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel says Germany will step up its training of Afghan police but ruled out committing more troops.

John Moore/Getty Images

As North Korea moves toward its planned "satellite launch" in early April, Japan isn't the only country, that looks like it wants to be prepared to shoot the missile down. Noah Schachtman writes:

In what appears to be a response, the U.S. Navy is keeping a pair of destroyers in the East Sea, following joint exercises with the South Koreans. At least one of those ships, the USS John S. McCain, is capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.

The North Korean space launch vehicle, dubbed the Unha-2, is supposedly derived from the TaepoDong 2 (TD-2) missile. Pyongyang has been developing the thing since the 90s, but has never successfully shot one off. If that's right, it means the North Korean launcher is substantially bigger than the one Iran used. Tehran's Safir-2 has a mass of 26 tons. The Union of Concerned Scientists' David Wright thinks the TD-2 is more like 80 tons, more than three times the mass. (MIT's Geoffrey Forden comes up with a similar figure.)

If those estimates are on target, it means that a successful North Korean missile test could be much more destabilizing than the Iranian launch. Forden calculates it could send a "1000 kilogram warhead over the pole a distance of almost 12,000 kilometers," or 7,200 miles. The satellite the Iranians put in orbit was only 27 kilograms. And, of course, Kim Jong-Il already has nukes; the mullahs don't, yet.