Hasta La Gadget!

By James M. Dorsey

Mounting anger among Saudi soccer clubs at their subjugation to quotas designed to encourage employment of Saudi nationals and reduce dependence on foreign labour illustrates problems encountered by wealthy Gulf countries in balancing the contradictory demands of labour markets, often lopsided demographics, social contracts involving a cradle-to-grave welfare state that creates unrealistic employment expectations, and organizations’ need to hire personnel on the basis of nationality rather than merit.

The clubs, many of which are owned by members and associates of the ruling Al Saud family but publicly funded, warned that a Labour Ministry decision to include them in a quota system intended to force the private sector to hire a larger number of Saudi nationals could disadvantage them by preventing them from hiring foreign talent.

The clubs’ complaint mirrors problems across the Gulf with government efforts to encourage preferential employment of nationals. The complaint is particularly stark given that the kingdom unlike smaller Gulf states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates still boasts a population in which nationals constitute a majority, if only a slim one. Qataris, for example, account for a mere six percent of the Qatari labour market, making the country wholly dependent on foreign labour with no prospect of altering the market balance.

As a result, labour quota systems may encourage nationals to consider a wider range of employment opportunities but are unlikely to resolve the underlying demographic problem. The quotas also at times force organizations to hire nationals who may be less qualified or motivated than foreigners – a concern among football clubs where foreign talent plays a key role. The problem of Saudi clubs is compounded by the kingdom’s reluctance to encourage Saudi players to garner experience by playing abroad for foreign clubs.

The anger of Saudi clubs at the Labour Ministry decision comes moreover at a time that Gulf states with Qatar and the UAE in the lead are under mounting pressure to abolish restrictive labour systems that put foreign employees at the mercy of their employers. Human rights and trade union activists, who originally targeted Qatar after its winning in 2010 of a bid to host the 2022 World Cup, have in recent months expanded their campaign to include various Gulf states.

In contrast to world soccer body FIFA president Sepp Blatter who this week denied that his group was accountable for the welfare of migrant labour in Qatar, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) vice president Sebastian Coe said his group would hold Qatar responsible for human and labour rights. The IAAF last month awarded Qatar the 2019 athletics world championship.

“I recognise that there are political implications about taking sport into different environments and with that falls responsibility to international federations. Labour conditions and how your event is delivered are very important issues for federations and particularly for young people. And if we are engaging with young people, they sit at the moral hotspots of all those big global issues and it is absolutely essential sport confronts them,” Mr. Coe told a news conference in London.

His remarks were in line with a growing willingness in sports driven by International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach to make human rights a criterion for the awarding of hosting rights for mega sports events.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman – agreed earlier this week on measures to improve the working and living conditions of migrant workers in a bid to fend off more far-reaching demands by human rights and trade union activists, including the abolition of the restrictive kafala or sponsorship system and the right to organize freely.

An estimated 15 million migrant workers of which a majority hail from Asia are employed in the Gulf. Foreigners account for almost half of the GCC’s total population of 50 million.

The Saudi clubs, in an environment in which demographics is a sensitive subject that is only cautiously if at all discussed publicly and in which parties are reluctant to publicly criticize a policy that is projected as a national initiative, have framed their criticism of the labour ministry decision in terms of their classification as private sector employers.

“The ministry has not classified us appropriately and is treating us as part of the private sector. We are obliged to hire Saudis just to stay away from the red category (that indicates failure to meet the Saudization quota). We are incapable of helping the Saudization effort as we are in need of foreigners,” the Saudi Gazette quoted Al-Salam FC president Fadil Al-Nimr as saying.

To bolster their objection to being classified as private enterprises, soccer club executives argued that their budgets were funded and supervised by the kingdom’s General Presidency of Youth Welfare (GPYF) that is responsible for sports in the country and is headed by a member of the ruling family.
“We are not a profitable organization to be treated like private companies. We are under constricted budgets allocated by the government to serve the country,” the head of Ittifaq FC, Abdulaziz Al-Dowsari told the Gazette.

The club’s spokesmen, Adnan Al-Muaibid, added that the club’s legal arrangements, budget and administration were the responsibility of the GPYF. “We should not be included in Nitaqat (quota) program. Its conditions do not apply to us and is restricting our athletic and financial status. We will challenge the decision and we are currently trying to deliver our opinions to the ministry,” Mr. Al-Muaibid said.

Unwittingly, the executives’ opposition to the quota system highlighted tight government control of soccer in the kingdom and much of the rest of the Middle East and North Africa despite efforts by FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) to maintain the fiction of a separation of sports and politics.

Saudi Arabia has long had a complex relationship with the sport that evokes passions similar to those sparked by religion and social issues and was only legalized in the kingdom in 1951. Saudi authorities recently considered emphasizing individual rather than team sports in drafting the kingdom’s five-year, men-only national sports plan, but ultimately backed away from the suggestion because of soccer’s immense popularity. Saudi clerics rolled out mobile mosques during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa in an effort to persuade fans gathered in cafes to watch matches to observe obligatory prayer times.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with the same title.

Verizon may not be releasing its first LTE-only phones until 2016, but it’s already preparing for the day when its legacy CDMA and EV-DO networks ride into the sunset. Wireless tracker Milan Milanovic has discovered that the carrier is now using LTE …

This summer, while crossing the Boston Common, I came across an anti-drone protest. Out of curiosity I approached one of the protestors handing out anti-drone fliers decrying the fact that “99% of the people that die in the CIA’s robotic drone war in Pakistan are civilians.” The image the protestor painted for me was of Pakistani towns on fire as robotic drones, which resembled alien spaceships from War of the Worlds, clumsily killed innocent civilians.

Having been to the tribal zones in Pakistan where the deadly Predator and Reaper drones hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists while doing research for my recent book on the subject, Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on al-Qaeda, I knew the protestors’ claims were wildly exaggerated. There was no way that the drones, which distantly circle over their targets for over 24 hours, monitoring their “pattern of life” movements with high-resolution cameras before firing GPS- or laser-guided mini-missiles at the enemy (who have also been monitored by spies and telephone intercepts), were engaged in the most uniquely imprecise bombing campaign in history. But wild claims by anti-drone activists dominate the conversation on drones, since the CIA and military have an official policy of not commenting on drone strikes. Average U.S. citizens cannot talk to drone pilots to find out whom they are killing based on what intelligence and why.

However, recently, at a conference on drones at Boston College, I got the extraordinary opportunity to do just that. I got to meet drone pilots and one general who controls drone operations and candidly discuss what it is like to follow human targets on the ground from cameras mounted on a drone flying two miles away and then kill them in an instant with Hellfire missiles. While one might expect the U.S.-based drone pilots who act as remote judge, jury and executioner to be cold-blooded, remorseless killers (their remotely piloted planes are called Reapers and Predators, after all), I found them to be incredibly thoughtful, introspective and deeply concerned about the notion of killing even one civilian bystander.

One Predator pilot told me that when you make your first kill, it shakes you to your core for several days, and that you never get used to it. The image of a human target you have been following closely on a camera being killed by your missile stays with you. Another drone pilot told me of an incident where he watched a known terrorist walk outside his house with children around him, causing the pilot to make the decision to hold off on killing the terrorist to avoid causing civilian “collateral damage.” All the pilots vehemently rejected the notion that the “robotic” drones (which are actually not Terminator-style robots, because humans control them) lead to a video-game mentality whereby pilots don’t see their targets as real humans. On the contrary, the hours spent surreptitiously spying on their targets through the lenses of high-resolution cameras allow the pilots to get to know their targets intimately in ways bomber pilots in the past could not. Killing their targets in this fashion is far more intimate and personal than traditional bombings by high-flying, supersonic bombers.

As for the claims by the anti-drone activists that the CIA’s separate drone campaign is more imprecise than, say, the firebombing of Dresden during World War II or the carpet bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, my own research disproves this notion. The drone pilots are aided in their precision by such tactics as the use of homing beacons, which are secretly placed on Taliban targets’ cars.

Drone missiles are then fired and home in on these beacons on targets once the terrorists’ cars have been driven out of civilian-packed villages. As for the drone mini-missiles, including the new 21-inch Scorpion SSW (Small Smart Weapon), they are so small that they do not create large explosions of the sort created by, say, a traditional 2,000-pound “dumb bomb.” This means there is less of a chance that nearby bystanders will be accidentally killed by shrapnel in the small explosion radius. Such tactics help explain the unprecedented low civilian-to-militant kill ratios from drone strikes. According to the widely respected Long War Journal, there have been 2,706 Taliban and al-Qaeda militants killed in the drone campaign in Pakistan, at a cost of just 156 civilians.

As for the image painted for me by the drone protestors in the Boston Common that drones are flying over Pakistani cities clumsily killing civilians, the drone campaign takes place only in the remote tribal zones controlled by the Taliban. It is easy to find local tribal voices who support the drones strikes on the Taliban, who behead their maliks (elders), burn their schools, enforce harsh Shariah law, stone women, etc. The drones strike fear into the heart of the Taliban and effectively terrorize the terrorists far more than civilians who know the campaign is not targeting them.

In summary, then, I believe one needs to be skeptical when assessing the inflated civilian-death-toll claims of the anti-drone protestors. For all their fearsome names, the Predators and Reapers, while far from perfect, are engaged in perhaps the most precise, discriminating “bombing” (i.e., guided missile) campaign in history. If one accepts the fact that the U.S. and Pakistani governments cannot simply surrender to the terrorists, then the drones are the most humane solution to defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda cancer that threatens the U.S., Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Brian Glyn Williams is a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and the author of The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan Warrior Who Led U.S. Special Forces to Overthrow the Taliban Regime and Afghanistan Declassified: A Guide to America’s Longest War.

After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

For more food drink and travel videos visit www.potluckvideo.com

Nigella Lawson is a renowned cookbook author and television host, but who knew she was great at beer pong?

We sat down with Lawson to celebrate the launch of the third season of The Taste — airing Thursday December 4 at 9pm on ABC — and we asked her 5 Questions on everything ranging from whether the Taste judges Anthony Bourdain, Marcus Samuelsson and Ludo Lefebvre are competitive behind closed doors to how she recently became a ‘guest star’ on Modern Family.

To watch Nigella Lawson’s full interview — and learn about what will be in her next cookbook and really get the details on that beer pong talent — watch the full video above!

For more great food, drink and travel videos make sure to check out Potluck Video’s website, head over to our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter