Isaac Osei’s call On Nana: Where Is The Truth In The Matter?

Ambassador Isaac Osei

By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor

Folks, it is interesting how language cuts in many ways to make or mar human communication—with results that may be pleasant or tormenting. As a language lover, I have always been keen on playing language games. It’s all based on SEMANTICS (meaning-making), which I enjoy.

Yesterday, the news media carried a report in which they quoted Mr. Isaac Osei (NPP MP for Subin and former Ambassador to the UK and Ireland and Chief Executive Officer of Ghana COCOBOD) as saying “Akufo-Addo must retire from politics”. He was reported to have said so in an interview with “Radio XYZ Breakfast Show” host, Moro Awudu, on Monday.

I took a critical look at the rationale behind that call: “Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is better off retiring from politics now to avoid sullying his statesmanship” and the highlights of Mr. Osei’s viewpoints that jumped at me:

• Akufo-Addo shot into the realm of statesmanship the moment he conceded after the election petition verdict was pronounced last year.

• “I think, at the moment, Nana Addo has transcended politics and has moved into the realm of statesmanship. He’s become a statesman. If I were to advise Nana Addo, I’ll say that let his legacy be that”.

• “Nana Addo has carved a certain niche for himself. He has moved a notch above politics to become a statesman with that singular statement that he made”.

• Nana Akufo-Addo's "... whole demeanour [and] comportment during the trial of the election petition case, and then his statement on the day when judgment was given put him on a certain pedestal”.

(See: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=297159)

When I read the report, I quickly dismissed it as not worth my bother, apparently because I won’t be surprised if Akufo-Addo goes that way. He has seen his better days in Ghanaian politics, even if his ambition to become the President, “come what may”, hasn’t materialized. The future doesn’t look good for him either to make me think that he will be Ghana’s President.

But Mr. Osei’s alleged call took me in a different direction to wonder if he wasn’t making that call to clear the path for himself since he indicated in the same breath that he could himself contest the NPP’s flagbearership at the March congress. And Akufo-Addo is a barrier to the other aspirants therein. A portion of the statement did say, however, that Mr. Osei said he “is ready to support the former Attorney General if he decides to run for president again”.

Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo

At the back of my mind was the nagging question: Has Mr. Osei not made utterances that will send him to the NPP’s Sanhedrin (as is the norm for those making such high-stakes utterances)? And considering the fact that some of the party’s stalwarts have already declared their support for Akufo-Addo and vowed to use the last drop of adrenaline in them to defend that cause, won’t Mr. Osei be hounded from within?

Even before I could find answers to these questions, Mr. Osei has sprung to his feet to deny ever making that call. The truth has sunk in that the implications of the utterances attributed to him are dire, not only for his own political interests and reputation but also for the NPP itself.

So, his reason for rebutting the news report? His “comment about the political future of Akufo-Addo was “misconstrued to suit the house style of the media house which reported the issue.”

(See: http://www.myjoyonline.com/politics/2014/January-8th/i-never-said-akufo-addo-should-retire-from-politics-isaac-osei.php)

MY COMMENTS

So, what exactly did Mr. Osei say?

Folks, it’s a language game here. Take a critical look at Mr. Osei’s own admission and juxtapose it with what was reported in the media to see things for yourselves.

I have done so and can see no difference. It is all a matter of SEMANTICS—differences in meaning making—which reinforces my claim that different people read different meanings into utterances based on their particular positions of situatedness. It is readers who make meaning, not writers or speakers. People see what they want to see, not what somebody wants them to see. Here is why:

The operational statement in Mr. Osei’s own admission is that Akufo-Addo has “become a statesman. If I was to advise Nana Addo, I’ll say that let his legacy be that”.

And the news medium’s version is: “Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is better off retiring from politics now to avoid sullying his statesmanship”.

True, there are some clear differences in the framing of thoughts in the two versions, especially the part in the news report saying that Akufo-Addo “is better off retiring from politics now” and “to avoid sullying his statesmanship”. In his rebuttal, Mr. Osei didn’t admit saying so categorically.

The original statement made by him curtly portrayed Akufo-Addo as reaching the ultimate—statesmanship—meaning that he “is wise and skilled and engaged in fixing the policies and conducting the affairs of a government” (dictionary definition). The news report rightly mentioned this aspect of statesmanship.

Unfortunately for Mr. Osei, the part that conveys the part on “retirement” from politics is contained in his own words, even if subtly framed: “If I was to advise Nana Addo, I’ll say that let his legacy be that”. This part came after the idea of Akufo-Addo’s achieving statesmanship had been stated.

I repeat Mr. Osei’s words: “Let his legacy be that”. No more movement forward in a political bid because there is nothing beyond statesmanship to accomplish. The mentioning of LEGACY forbids any further aspiration.

Now, folks, tell me: What is considered a LEGACY and how is it recognized vis-à-vis the one leaving it behind? Can there be a legacy if the one supposedly to leave it behind is still in control of it (in Akufo-Addo’s case, still vying for the flagbearer position to contest the Presidential elections)? What, then, will constitute the legacy that Mr. Osei is talking about?

Folks, it’s all a matter of diplomacy, especially now that Mr. Osei is seeing issues from a wider angle to know the dire implications. I don’t see anything drastically different from the meaning that can be inferred from what the news medium reported him as saying and what he is advancing as the grounds for claiming that his original utterances were misconstrued and forced into the agenda of the news medium.

As for his other reasons to mitigate the impact of the reported utterances, they can be brushed aside as “diplomatic niceties” after the fact.

True, every media house has its house style to guide its writers. Such editorial policies cover many areas and are aimed at streamlining how written communication emanating from there should be shaped. But in Mr. Osei’s case, it is clear that he is scared stiff about the implications of his utterances and shifting blame to save his skin from the NPP’s

Sanhedrin.

I didn’t get the chance to listen to the interview, but I hope Radio XYZ will respond to Mr. Osei’s accusation for us to move on. When politicians get carried away only to turn round to blame the media for putting words in their mouths, they sicken me!

Is Mr. Osei running away from the consequences of his own utterances?

I shall return…

• E-mail: mjbokor@yahoo.com

• Join me on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/mjkbokor to continue the conversation.

Editorial

Please Mr President

For more than two years Ghana has managed to draw only US$600 million out of a US$ 3 billion Chinese loan.

The difficulty has to do with the slow pace of designing projects, counterpart funding and cumbersome procedures.

As a fact the Government and people of China have always expressed firm solidarity with the peoples of Africa in the struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism.

In our view the extension of this huge facility to Ghana is in the realm of the continuing solidarity.

Indeed, Ghana began developing special relations which China during the Presidency of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Chairman Mao.

This relationship can be strengthened for the mutual benefit of the two countries.

The Insight urges President John Dramani Mahama to enter into special discussions with his Chinese counterpart to facilitate the early disbursement of the loan and better relations between the two countries.

This is urgent.

Truth guarantees demise of West

David Cameron, British Prime Minaister

By Butler Shaffer

My book, The Wizards of Ozymandias, was dedicated “To the memory and spirit of Sophie and Hans Scholl and the White Rose, who reminded us what it means to be civilized.” 

These wonderful young people – most in their teens or twenties – lived in Germany during the Hitler regime, and spent much of their time writing and distributing leaflets exposing and criticizing the policies and practices of the Nazi state. 

They were found out; brought to trial; found guilty of treason, the demoralization of the troops, and abetting the enemy, and summarily beheaded. Sophie’s Gestapo interrogator raises the same arguments one hears directed against such modern speakers of truth as Chelsea Manning, Ed Snowden, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, and others.

Those whose moral and intellectual standards can rise no higher than to whine “the law is the law,” would do well to consider the exchange between Sophie and her prosecutor. The Nazi functionary declares: “Without law, there is no order. What can we rely on if not the law?” Sophie responds: “Your conscience. Laws change. Conscience doesn’t.

Our Western culture is in a state of total collapse. Our institutionalized world is increasingly hostile to any utterances of truth that would be upsetting to the status quo. 

The mainstream media and most of academia long ago gave themselves over to propagandizing on behalf of defending and/or enhancing the coercive power structure of the state. When war policies are under discussion, retired Army generals or officials from “think-tanks” funded by the national defense industry, are trotted out to “debate” such non-issues as how many troops to send in, who to attack, etc., etc., all to maintain the pretense of having a “fully-informed” public. 

But when was the last time you saw...Noam Chomsky...or other critic of the war system allowed to raise the kinds of questions that are not supposed to be asked in this best of all possible worlds?  

US President Hussein Obama

Do you recall the insult to human intelligence perpetrated by the GOP (Grand Old Pettifoggers) in its efforts to prevent Ron Paul from expressing his contrary views?

Noam Chomsky’s above quote doesn’t go far enough: it is the responsibility of all thinking people – not just so-called “intellectuals” – to speak the truth and to expose lies! To this end, increasing numbers of people understand that the sources to whom they have been conditioned to look for truth, analysis, and understanding, have largely failed in their roles. 

To put the proposition more frankly: more and more people have grasped the fact that the free flow of information is disruptive of the interests of the institutional order, whose established position depends upon suppressing or destroying all evidence of the lies, conflicts, contradictions, and destructive nature upon which its primacy depends.

This is why so much of the media and academia are peopled with those unable or unwilling to shed light on the dysfunctional nature of the well-ordered madness of the world; men and women who remain content to tread water at the shallow end of the human gene pool!

The political establishment has implicitly embraced the mindset of Hitler’s Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels:

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."

This is why the state is so threatened by such modern technologies as the Internet, as well as by the “whistleblowers” who insist on exposing the state’s embarrassing truths to the general public. It is also why the classic The Emperor’s New Clothes needs to be read to every child – as well, perhaps, to adults.

French President Francois Hollande

Cable news channels continue providing platforms for those who  remind us that the whistleblowers “broke the law,” and need to be punished. They recite their bromides with the kind of self-assurance that comes from the delusion that they are actually saying something profound. I find it particularly amusing to hear such babbling coming from lawyers who ought to know that all laws are meant to be broken. 

Imagine what would happen if every legal dictate were to be obeyed by everyone: no speeding or reckless driving; no illegal drug use; no murders, rapes, or robberies; no discriminatory hiring practices; no zoning violations; etc. What would be the likely consequences? 

Men and women might then begin to ask the kinds of questions the state could not afford to have asked: why do we need the police, or courts, or prisons? In the world of realpolitik, those who are driven not by a need for social order, but by the ambition for coercive power over their neighbors, would have to dream up new “wrongs” to be policed.

The mania that underlies political programs based on “climate change” is just one example of how those who want power over others must invent more and more “conflicts” with which to rationalize their coercive ambitions...

This also explains Randolph Bourne’s observation that “war is the health of the state.” The war system – whose schemes and chicanery the whistleblowers have been exposing – depends upon the kinds of endless conflicts with the rest of the world that will cause Boobus Americanus to part with his liberty, wealth, and life.

Sophie and Hans Scholl and their White Rose friends had minds capable of distinguishing what was legal and what was right, a skill that depends upon separating what is popular from what is true. Sophie’s insights were reflected, years later, in Hannah Arendt’s observation: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Boundaries of Order. His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias.

Afghanistan: The Desert of Death

By Anatol Lieven

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

A number of writers have preceded me in quoting Shelley’s Ozymandias to evoke the huge US and NATO bases planted since 2001 in Afghanistan. The comparison is irresistible, but not necessarily apt. Even if only the head and legs were left, bits of Ozymandias’s statue had still presumably survived for three thousand years or so, which is a pretty good record as these things go. Few US or NATO officials, by contrast, seem to be planning seriously much beyond the next three years.

In Kabul, the changes wrought by the West’s twelve-year Afghan adventure have a certain solidity, at least to the point where the banks and office buildings would make for reasonably imposing and long-lasting ruins. Even some more intelligent members of the Taliban seem to recognize that the Afghan capital, a city of some five million people, is no longer the rubble-filled and shrunken city that they ruled in 2001; that the modern educated classes have grown to the point where they cannot be subjected to the moral code of a madrassa in a Pashtun mountain village; and that if a future Afghan government including the Taliban wants the help of these people—those who do not depart following the West’s withdrawal—in ruling and developing Afghanistan, it will have to grant them some freedom.

In the southern Pashtun province of Helmand, however, the atmosphere is very different. The presence of the Taliban is much more palpable both from conversations and the watchfulness of the Western forces. The veil of progress brought by the West is also a great deal thinner. During a recent trip with NATO officials, I was kept within the fortified perimeters of the US and British forces and the Afghan government centers—an indication of the current level of concern about the Taliban.

Visiting US and NATO bases there, I found that the images that came to mind were not Ozymandian images of long-fallen imperial grandeur, but rather those of science fiction: of Ray Bradbury’s human and Martian species meeting under an enormous, indifferent sky amidst the vast and utterly strange landscape of Mars. In an even gloomier mood, I thought of the Strugatsky brothers’ dystopian novel Roadside Picnic, on which Tarkovsky’s film Stalker was based. The premise is that aliens dropped by briefly on earth for some reason of their own, leaving behind a weirdly transformed landscape littered with discarded alien objects. In fact, seen from the air at night, Helmand’s huge Western military installations—Camp Leatherneck, the US Marine base, and the adjacent Camp Bastion, the main British base—look like a giant spaceship, a great blob of blazing lights amid a dark sea of desert. At the height of the Western occupation, the camps used more electricity than the rest of the province put together. Every drop of fuel for the generators had to be shipped in through Pakistan, along with every drop of mineral water and every bite of food consumed by the troops.

And if you want to move from science fiction to Alice in Wonderland, ask yourself this: how has it been possible to bring all that stuff in by road through areas of Pakistan controlled largely by the Pakistani Taliban, allied to the Afghan Taliban—areas from which Pakistani Taliban have launched innumerable attacks on Pakistani forces? Why have there been so few attacks, and those few (to judge by circumstantial evidence) only when the Pakistani military wants to send a message to Washington? The answer appears to be that the Taliban tax these NATO convoys as they tax all other trade in the region: Obtaining tax revenues from mineral water, fruit juice, hamburgers, and other NATO necessities that do them no harm at all is, it turns out, far more advantageous than interrupting our supply routes. In other words, all these years NATO has actually been subsidizing the Taliban’s war effort.

In the winter of 1989 I traveled in the countryside of neighboring Kandahar Province as a British journalist with the Western-backed Afghan Mujahedin—made up of the same Pashtun farmers whose sons or grandsons are now presumably fighting for the Taliban. Traveling by pickup truck with the Afghan guerrillas, I was struck by the amazingly sharp and vivid transition between the brown and grey dust and sand of the desert and the bright green of the much smaller watered zones. It left me with an enduring impression of the sheer size and emptiness of southern Afghanistan, and the inability of outside powers to control movement through it—at least, without forces that were vastly larger than the Soviets or the West have been willing to deploy. (One of the deserts in Helmand is called the Desert of Death and another the Desert of Hell, which gives you a rough idea of both the scenery and the climate.)

Now, as US and British forces pull back, and the Afghan National Army abandons its outlying positions, the presence of the Afghan government in Helmand is likely to shrink to spots on the landscape, like the town of Sangin and the provincial center of Lashkar Gah, both of which my companions and I visited on our NATO trip. In Sangin, we spoke with senior local officials, who, while reassuring us of their determination to fight on, cast serious doubt on whether the Afghan government would be able to do so after the US withdrawal. As one official told us, most of the ordinary soldiers of the Afghan National Army are people who were just on their way to Iran or Pakistan to look for work and were stopped, offered pay and put in the army. If their pay stops for even two months, they will all leave and go home. Then we here will have no choice but to fight and die ourselves. Afghanistan will be a picture that you would not wish to see yourselves if you looked in a mirror…You are leaving too soon. Can’t you see that we have Iran on one side and Pakistan on the other, both of them enemies. If you don’t go on helping us, we are finished.

The officials we spoke to were skeptical about the possibility of a settlement with the Taliban, unless the US itself were to take the lead. A few weeks after our visit to Sangin, however, the local Afghan National Army units reached an agreement with the Taliban to provide joint security in the district. The deal has been bitterly criticized by some Western observers and by some leaders in Kabul, but it seems to have the solid support of most of the local population. In fact, it is highly reminiscent of similar local agreements between government forces and Mujahedin I witnessed in 1988 and 1989: deals that, by sparing local areas from continued fighting, allowed guerrillas to transfer forces to other battlefields and permitted the peaceful local cultivation and division of the opium poppy crop. After the Soviet withdrawal at least, such deals also prepared the way for the eventual negotiated surrender of the government forces and their return to their homes.

Of course, just as in the late 1980s, such deals threaten both the central government’s and the Talban high command’s control over their local commanders. Rather than the Taliban sweeping Vietnam-style over the ramparts and destroying the regime after US forces withdrawal, what we may well see in southern Afghanistan for a number of years to come is a patchwork of local truces in some areas and battles in others, depending largely on local tribal rivalries, and agreement (or lack of it) on the division of the heroin trade. As after 1989, however, this situation is unlikely to be stable, for such local compromises are deeply vulnerable to pressures from powerful outside forces, in Afghanistan itself and in the region.

* * *

With this bleak prospect, it would be tempting to write off most of the years of Western effort in these parts as hopeless and foredoomed. However, an important book published in 2013, Carter Malkasian’s War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier, tells a more positive story about the US “surge” after 2009—and for that reason, paradoxically, is still more depressing in retrospect. Malkasian was a political officer for the State Department who spent two years working with the US Marines in Helmand. His book, which I read during my visit to the province this fall, is loosely modeled on a classic of Vietnam War analysis, War Comes to Long An by Jeffrey Race, who likewise served as a US adviser there. War Comes to Garmser is far more than a vivid account of the US campaign in one district of Afghanistan. It is also a brilliant analysis of that district’s history, economy, and anthropology, with lessons that stretch far beyond Afghanistan.

Malkasian brings out the fact that, after the initial debacle of the dreadfully-planned British intervention in Helmand starting in 2006, the US and British military effort there was not the exercise in “plowing the sea” that has sometimes been portrayed. To the contrary, during the first two years of the “surge,” the Taliban were in fact driven back a long way, their attacks greatly diminished, and the extent of their control even in their former heartlands significantly reduced. Losses to US and British forces were severe, but the campaign did achieve its immediate objectives.

These local victories, however, were only intended to buy time and space for the development of the Afghan state and the search for a “political settlement.” This was in itself an entirely sensible strategy on the part of the Obama administration. The problem is that the time made available by Washington for any lasting development of the Afghan state was grotesquely short, and a political settlement was neither defined nor pursued with any consistency—even at moments when it might have succeeded.

Of course, much of the blame resides with the administration of George W. Bush, who was in office for more than half the Western presence in Afghanistan. Malkasian brings out the truly shocking slowness and carelessness of Bush administration efforts to build the Afghan National Army, let alone the Afghan state—projects that were above all compromised by the monstrous distraction of the unnecessary Iraq War. As the British staff of the Provincial Reconstruction team in Helmand told us, at the end of the Bush years in 2008 there was still no policy at all for governance in Afghanistan below the national level.

Yet the Obama administration cannot escape blame of its own. Not only did it set a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of US combat troops—a date that was obviously far too soon for the effects of the surge to be consolidated and the project of building up the Afghan state to be feasible. But Obama’s failure to seek talks with the Afghan Taliban during his first years in office, when US and allied forces were driving the Taliban back, was an error that should be apparent from a freshman’s course in negotiating strategy. Overtures that might have received a positive Taliban response in 2010, when the Taliban was being driven back and suffering heavy casualties, naturally have received a far cooler response in 2013 and early 2014, with US forces already beginning to withdraw.

Malkasian also makes clear that the Western gains in Helmand may be only temporary. The Taliban retain strong support among many local tribes and groups, and even those that currently support the Kabul government are deeply divided. Malkasian notes that local compromises have repeatedly broken down over the past thirty years here, except when the Kabul-based state has been powerful enough to force local rivals to co-operate. It is highly doubtful that the Karzai government is in position to do that today; and still more doubtful that its successor will be able to once US forces are gone. The last time a governor of Helmand was replaced by Karzai, he left Lashkar Gah by helicopter, taking the entire senior administrative staff of the province with him (something about which the governor of Sangin district complained bitterly). Disgraceful of course, but I’m not sure I really blame them.

Yet the West must still pursue peace with the Taliban. For the alternative to a settlement is a civil war with no foreseeable end, fueled not only by Afghan hatreds but by aid from Pakistan, India, Russia, and Iran to their local proxies. As after 1989, these outside interests and rivalries will make it even more difficult for the Afghans to work out their differences, and will, in all likelihood, continually disrupt any local agreements in areas like Helmand. National political and military leaders in Pakistan and India do not appear to be seeking such a proxy war in Afghanistan, but Delhi and Islamabad both seem trapped on a path that is all too likely to lead to one.

This is the second of two posts by Anatol Lieven about the future of Afghanistan. Previously, he examined Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s standoff with the West. January 7, 2014, 4:30 p.m.

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