Author: Murtaza Hussain

September 8, 2022

An Especially Cold Winter: How Trump Helped Cause the European Natural Gas Crisis

A natural gas refinery constructed in Asaluyeh, Iran, by a company tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, shown in 2019. Such gas infrastructure projects have been limited by U.S. sanctions.

Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP

With the conflict in Ukraine still raging, the Russian government has decided to hit Europeans where it hurts: by targeting their supplies of natural gas. This week, the Kremlin announced that it would be shutting off the critical Nord Stream 1 pipeline until the “collective West” lifts sanctions against Russia.

Europe is in for a very hard winter. The move came with energy prices in Europe already surging and consumers and businesses feeling the sting. Now, the continent faces the almost certain prospect of energy rationing and blackouts during the coldest months of the year. Politicians are warning of potential major social unrest and political instability in the European Union — a dream scenario for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as his government seeks to punish Ukraine’s allies for their role in the war.

With European countries casting about desperately for a way to replace Russian energy supplies, there is notionally one major producer of natural gas whose reserves could help ease global markets if they were tapped: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran has the second largest natural gas reserves on the planet, though these supplies are currently cut off from the market by U.S. sanctions. Amid ongoing talks in Vienna to lift sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear program — which, if successful, would theoretically make Iranian oil and gas accessible to the world once more to the West — Iranian politicians are increasingly referencing their ability to alleviate Europe’s crisis.

“Given Europe’s energy supply problems triggered by the Ukraine crisis, Iran could provide Europe’s energy needs if sanctions against it are lifted,” Iran’s foreign ministry’s spokesperson Nasser Kanani said recently in an interview. Mohammed Marandi, an adviser to Iran’s negotiating team in Vienna, made similar comments to Al Jazeera last week, linking Europe’s energy crisis to the sanctions on Iran, adding, “Iran wants a deal, but the Europeans need a deal.” (Marandi has also regularly made light of the growing inequalities between Europe and the United States, in terms of energy access as a result of the crisis, on social media.)

These claims that Iran could rapidly step in to solve Europe’s woes are somewhat overstated. Although Iran does have massive natural gas reserves, the necessary pipeline and shipping infrastructure simply does not exist at present for exporting gas to Europe. To put it simply, there is no flip of a switch that can rapidly turn on supplies to Europe and help them cope with the winter ahead.

There is, however, a grain of truth to Iranian claims: The United States is partly responsible for Europe’s predicament.

The relationship between Europe’s gas crisis and the failures of American foreign policy are directly tied to the negotiations now taking place in Vienna — negotiations that are themselves merely an attempt to salvage a nuclear deal that was already in place seven years ago. That was the deal that could have helped ease Europe’s current pain.

Although Iran today lacks the pipeline infrastructure to connect its natural gas supplies to European markets, there was an opportunity to develop those means following the signing of the 2015 nuclear deal. European energy experts were already talking up the benefits of opening a new import route from Iran — one that would help Europe diversify its supplies in the long term and wean it off Russian dependency.

The political stability needed for such developments never materialized — and this is where the U.S. comes in. The original nuclear deal was reached in July 2015 and full implementation was confirmed in January 2016. Five months later, Donald Trump would announce his run for president, campaigning on tearing up the nuclear deal. By the time he was elected in November 2016, it was clear to the Iranians that the nuclear deal was hardly worth the paper it was written on.

Watching these events, the world had quickly realized that Iranian energy supplies wouldn’t be reliable, giving other countries little incentive to help Iran build up its natural gas infrastructure. By the time Trump exited the deal entirely in 2018, plugging into Iranian natural gas supplies would be too risky for European investors.

There was a clear incentive to spread the risk around by adding Iran to its energy mix, but thanks to a volatile president and national security hawks in D.C. utterly indifferent to European concerns, that opportunity to chart a different path was lost.

In that sense, America’s reckless actions in the Middle East over the years have worked to tie Europe’s hands and prevent it from independently developing an energy policy that would allow it to resist the bullying from Russia that it is experiencing today. If the deal had been allowed to flourish, without the clear signal less than a year in that it would imminently collapse, it’s possible the necessary Iranian natural gas infrastructure would already be in place.

And it’s not just natural gas: Iranian oil could also ease energy costs around the world — oil that is also similarly constrained by U.S. sanctions. At a G7 meeting this summer, a French official relayed concerns about getting Iranian as well as Venezuelan oil back on the global markets, referring to sanctions as a “knot that needs to be untied.” With the global economy already teetering on the brink thanks to the war, energy experts are also saying that the return of Iranian oil reserves — for which much infrastructure already exists — could help fill a “Russia-sized hole” in global markets.

Whether any of these knots are going to be untied or holes refilled remains an open question. Recent reports from the nuclear talks in Vienna have not been encouraging. Even if negotiations do reach a successful conclusion, they will do little to help in the short term. Yet with some European leaders looking ahead to warn that there may be a decade of “difficult winters” ahead, it’s worth reflecting on the importance of planning seriously for the future.

The potentially transformative vision of the original Iran nuclear deal was killed by the Trump administration. Now it is up to President Joe Biden to try and see if something worthwhile can replace it — for the sake of avoiding war between America and Iran, and also ensuring Europe can have reliable access to the natural gas needed to stick out the hard years ahead.

The post An Especially Cold Winter: How Trump Helped Cause the European Natural Gas Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
August 7, 2022

Why Is the UAE Detaining an American Lawyer Who Worked With Jamal Khashoggi?

Since the American lawyer Asim Ghafoor was arrested in July while trying to make a connecting flight in the United Arab Emirates, his supporters in Washington, D.C., have been speculating as to exactly why.

Emirati authorities detained Ghafoor on accusations of money laundering and tax evasion while he was catching a connecting flight, informing him that he had also been secretly tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia. Because of the UAE’s opaque legal system, many observers are suspicious that ulterior political motives led to his arrest. One theory stands out — and it has to do with the UAE’s close alliance with Saudi Arabia.

Ghafoor was associated with the murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose brutal killing embarrassed the Saudi crown prince and damaged his ties with the U.S. Coupled with the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s shared history of retaliating against critics — with the most infamous case in the West so far being Khashoggi himself — suspicions now suggest that this is what happened to Ghafoor.

Ghafoor and Khashoggi’s relationship is widely described as both a personal and professional one. Newspaper editorials, members of Congress, a statement by the D.C.-based advocacy organization Ghafoor co-founded with Khashoggi, and Ghafoor’s own attorney have all referred to Ghafoor as Khashoggi’s lawyer. “He previously represented Khashoggi as well as his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz,” The Associate Press reported of Ghafoor.

That relationship between the two men has been called into question by at least one source: Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr.

That there are close ties between the two men is not in dispute. Ghafoor helped the Saudi exile found the organization Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, the Washington-based foreign policy advocacy organization that issued a statement about the case. Yet Elatr has strongly denied the characterization that Ghafoor worked directly as a lawyer for Khashoggi.

“I wish Mr. Ghafoor well, but he was not the lawyer of my husband,” Elatr told The Intercept in an interview. “My husband did not have any legal issue that he needed a lawyer.” Elatr, who was herself detained in the UAE on two occasions, including once after Khashoggi’s death, has been critical of what she described as attempts to politicize his legacy.

Others close to Ghafoor, however, including his U.S.-based lawyer Faisal Gill, said that questions about the exact legal relationship between the two men are a “red herring,” since Ghafoor was known to have provided ongoing legal advice to Khashoggi in the context of their relationship as co-founders of DAWN. DAWN, for which Ghafoor continues to serve on the board, regularly criticizes arms sales and human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

“At the end of the day, Asim was one of the founders of DAWN, along with Jamal Khashoggi.”

“At the end of the day, Asim was one of the founders of DAWN, along with Jamal Khashoggi,” Gill said. “Asim regularly talked to him and advised him on different things, and he has also been integrally involved in the lawsuit filed over Jamal’s killing. Asim signed the contract that created DAWN, which Jamal Khashoggi also signed and that got him killed. He’s been involved in this entire matter since the beginning.”

Since Khashoggi’s murder, Ghafoor has also been part of DAWN’s legal team in its lawsuit against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is believed to have ordered Khashoggi’s killing. Gill is himself an attorney in the case, which is ongoing.

A declaration by Ghafoor filed in federal court last year as part of the lawsuit against the Saudi crown prince describes Ghafoor as a board member involved in the initial establishment of DAWN, stating that he had also “negotiated an agreement with Jamal Khashoggi for him to serve as the executive director of DAWN” in May 2018. The declaration claimed that Khashoggi’s murder had a chilling effect on the organization. “Mr. Khashoggi’s murder caused significant budgetary shortfalls for DAWN because donors reneged on commitments to financially support DAWN due to fear of retribution from the defendants in this case,” the declaration said.

Khashoggi’s fiancé at the time of his killing, Cengiz, also pointed to the connection with DAWN and Ghafoor’s role in its lawsuit over Khashoggi’s death. “Asim was a friend of Jamal Khashoggi and, as a lawyer, he helped set up the organisation ‘Democracy for the Arab World Now’ (‘DAWN’),” Cengiz wrote in a statement after Ghafoor was arrested. “I have an ongoing civil lawsuit against the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman and his co-conspirators in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The trial begins soon. Asim Ghafoor is part of DAWN’s legal team in this lawsuit. I am concerned that the UAE has jailed Asim to intimidate the legal team and myself, and anyone who calls for democracy in the Middle East.” (Cengiz did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ghafoor’s legal case in the UAE has likewise been cause for alarm by many U.S. politicians due to apparent violations of basic fairness and transparency. He was arrested at Dubai International Airport on July 14 while connecting flights, on his way to attend a family wedding in Istanbul. Ghafoor had transited flights through Dubai earlier this year without incident, but this time was approached and taken into custody by two plainclothes security officials.

Upon arrest, Ghafoor was informed that he had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison, a fine of $816,748, and deportation upon completion of his sentence. He had neither a chance to defend himself nor prior knowledge of the accusations against him.

On Monday, Ghafoor was denied bail in a court hearing, where he appeared for the first time since being placed into hospital isolation after contracting Covid-19 while in UAE custody. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for August 9.

Born in Missouri and raised in Texas, Ghafoor has been a well-known lawyer in D.C. for years. He worked on several high-profile national security and terrorism cases in the post-9/11 era and boasted strong political connections among both Democrats and Republicans.

In 2014, Ghafoor was the subject of a story in The Intercept after it was revealed that he had been the target of a National Security Agency spying program, along with several other prominent American Muslim activists, academics, and lawyers. Ghafoor was awarded $20,000 in damages after a previous revelation of government surveillance during one of his cases, though that judgment was reversed upon appeal.

The timing of his sudden arrest, which took place the same day that President Joe Biden was in the region meeting with Saudi leaders, raised questions about what role, if any, the U.S. government may have had in his detention.

Emirati authorities initially claimed that Ghafoor’s arrest was coordinated with U.S. authorities as part of an effort to stop “transnational crimes.” State Department spokesperson Ned Price appeared to dispute this in a press conference last week, saying that the U.S. had “not sought the arrest of Mr. Ghafoor” while directing questions to the Justice Department, which has declined to comment on the case.

While cautioning that the U.S. was still gathering information, Price added that the U.S. government did not have reason to believe Ghafoor’s detention is connected to his work with Khashoggi.

Nonetheless, the lack of transparency about his charges and conviction in the UAE is already driving widespread suspicion that Ghafoor is indeed being targeted for political reasons. At a time when transnational repression is increasing, the detention has also raised alarms about the U.S. government’s willingness to ensure due process for one of its own citizens detained by authoritarian allies like the UAE.

“It makes no sense that an American citizen charged with tax evasion would be accused and tried by local authorities in the United Arab Emirates — a matter like that seems likely to be handled by the IRS, not the UAE,” said Salam Al-Marayati, president and co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “We demand transparency and explanations from the American government about this issue. Unless more information is provided, we have to characterize him as a political prisoner.”

The post Why Is the UAE Detaining an American Lawyer Who Worked With Jamal Khashoggi? appeared first on The Intercept.
August 2, 2022

Al Qaeda Honcho Zawahiri Got Droned and No One Gave a Shit

Osama bin Laden, left, sits with Ayman al-Zawahiri circa Nov. 10, 2001, at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

Photo: Getty Images

What if a character that was once viewed as something of a boogeyman, even a Hitler-esque evil, was suddenly killed — and no one seemed to care? That’s more or less what happened this week, when Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s longtime leader, was finally tracked down by the United States.

Zahawiri, one of small circle of men responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was reportedly killed by a drone strike on a house in a trendy area of Kabul, Afghanistan. His death came over 20 years after the events that first made his name a byword for infamy.

Members of Gen Z could be forgiven for not knowing who he was, but that no one else seemed to care much seemed odd. Unlike Osama bin Laden’s death more than a decade ago, which prompted an outpouring of street celebrations and chest-beating by U.S. politicians and national security elites, the reaction to Zawahiri’s demise has been noticeably muted.

This won’t be the last drone strike or raid that the U.S. carries out in the Middle East, but the killing of Zawahiri marks the close of a particular chapter in American history. That it went so quietly suggests that the cultural and political behemoth that was the war on terror had already long preceded Zawahiri into the grave.

The United States is now preoccupied with a deadly war in Ukraine, as well as a growing rivalry with China that is likely to put far more strain on its resources than Al Qaeda ever did. After the collapse of the terrorist group the Islamic State, the U.S. has faced almost no jihadist attacks and is instead being hit with wave after wave of deadly far-right terrorism.

President Joe Biden announced Zawahiri’s killing in a sleepy address given Monday evening, saying, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” Very few, though, had been fearing Zawahiri — who had become better known for his conspiracy videos on global politics rather than actual terrorism — for a long time.

Biden’s usual subdued delivery was in this case matched by the reaction. If bin Laden’s death was a blockbuster, Zawahiri’s didn’t even go straight to VHS: NPR’s morning news had the killing as just another news item. By noon, the Zawahiri news had been pushed off the top of the New York Times’s website by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and a Style section story about an iconic New York City guitar teacher.

President Joe Biden announces the killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri from the White House on Aug. 1, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images

That Zawahiri’s death did not command much attention is a sign that global jihadism is not much of a priority anymore for the U.S. public — and also for Islamists themselves.

On the latter group, one need only look at the very country where Zawahiri was assassinated. The victory of the Afghan Taliban over the U.S. military and its allies in Afghanistan taught an important lesson to Islamists around the world. Whereas the Islamic State group carried out terrorist attacks against Western civilians that enraged foreign publics and justified crushing military responses, the Taliban laser-focused on the conflict on the ground at home against the Afghan central government, even cutting deals with the Americans to keep their troops out of the fray.

The result for Islamists in Afghanistan was far more successful than bin Laden’s famous idea of targeting the “far enemy” — the U.S. — as a means of drying up support for regional dictatorships. International terrorism was always a departure for Islamist groups, whose focus even in carrying out foreign attacks was to effect changes back home.

It seems likely that, as other analysts have noted, Islamist groups will return to this older model of fighting, which largely leaves the West out of it, rather than continuing with the failed approaches of bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their more radical offspring like the Islamic State group.

The killing of Zawahiri may provide a modicum of justice for the victims of the September 11 attacks. Indeed, it was the rare episode in the war on terror where someone responsible for 9/11 paid a price for it, however extrajudicial the punishment may have been. Only five of the hundreds of men held at the notorious Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp were put on trial for 9/11; they remain there, their cases stalled in pretrial hearings.

While it’s hard to find 9/11 perpetrators who paid for the attack in any way, millions of others have died, been wounded, or driven from their homes because of U.S. military actions following the attacks. The vast majority of these innocent victims had nothing to do with September 11 and indeed had never done any harm to the United States.

The great tragedy and crime of the war on terror was that the United States decided to take revenge for it on entire civilian populations of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, who bore no guilt for the 9/11 attacks. The historical record is a morally ugly one for the U.S., which is what makes it even harder to celebrate the killing of even one deserving terrorist after watching millions of other lives destroyed along the way.

An era is over with the death of Zawahiri, even if a rising generation of young Americans are not even aware of the fact. Jihadist terrorism may yet make a comeback, but I doubt it will do so anytime soon in a manner that affects Americans the way that September 11 did.

Zawahiri paid a price, yes. The great shame, however, are the many, many other criminals in this conflict who harmed innocent people without facing even an illusion of justice, inside the courts or outside them.

The post Al Qaeda Honcho Zawahiri Got Droned and No One Gave a Shit appeared first on The Intercept.
July 31, 2022

Proud Papa: How Joe Biden Became the Father of the Iranian Nuclear Bomb

President Joe Biden in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 2022.

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden has struggled mightily to pass any part of his domestic agenda. Yet there is one outcome he can take direct credit for, an accomplishment that, because of Washington’s screwed-up political incentives, he pulled off with almost no opposition.

After decades of halting progress to develop nuclear weapons capacity, Iran is now turning the final screws to bring them to that threshold. Iran is now closer than ever to developing an actual nuclear weapon — beyond the point where assassinations, sabotage, or even a campaign of airstrikes could significantly hinder its nuclear capacity. Both hawkish and dovish segments of the U.S. press point to a plain fact undergirding this development: The nuclear deal struck in 2015 is toast.

Iran’s path to the bomb has been helped by Biden’s stubborn refusal to make the compromises necessary to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran’s path to the bomb is of course of its own making, but it has been helped along the way by Biden’s stubborn refusal to make the compromises necessary to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in a fit of pique, and Biden campaigned on getting back in. When push came to shove, however, Biden refused to undo Trump’s aggressive measures.

It’s hard to say that the nuclear deal is definitively finished because, in theory, both parties could miraculously come to terms at any time. It could be accurately described as a zombie: not quite dead, but not about to have life breathed back into it either.

White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk reportedly told a group of think tank experts this Wednesday that any return to a deal was “highly unlikely.” Earlier, the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said, “I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted.” Both sides must now sign the deal on the table if they want to move forward, he added. The problem is that both the Americans and Iranians have already said that the deal currently on the table is unacceptable.

The Americans deserve the bulk of the blame: It was the U.S. that violated the agreement in the first place. Now, both sides — as well as regional countries — will be worse off amid the continuing fallout.

Perhaps the most interesting statement about the death of the nuclear deal came from the country whose political leadership did the most to kill it: Israel.

In an article published in Time this week, Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, laid out his case for why the end of the deal has ensured that Israel’s worst fears of a nuclear Iran will now become a reality. “This summer, Iran will turn into a de-facto threshold nuclear state,” Barak wrote, adding that Iran’s uranium enrichment program had now advanced to a point where it could be no longer be set back with military strikes or sabotage.

Barak, far from a dove, argued that the U.S. and Israel should have made plans to immediately attack Iran in 2018 after pulling out of the nuclear deal. For “unexplainable reasons” they failed to take this step, which would have set the program back by years. Instead, nuclear progress continued despite Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign. Iran’s enrichment programs are now beyond the point where they could be effectively targeted by outside attack.

Barak said that the ship had sailed on stopping a nuclear Iran. In lieu of even some weaker, limited new nuclear deal, Barak wrote, Israel and its neighboring states must simply try to contain an Iranian state that has finally crossed the nuclear threshold.

Iran has said, at least, that it will not build an actual nuclear bomb, and it likely won’t do so any time soon. Even after developing the capacity, mastering the technology necessary to deliver a warhead will take some time. The ability to maintain plausible deniability is also important for the Iranian government, which would like the benefits of a nuclear deterrent without taking the political heat. (Israel has maintained a policy of ambiguity — refusing to confirm or deny its nuclear arsenal — for decades for this reason.)

Recently, while noting that there was no decision to build a weapon, a top Iranian official said that Iran, in fact, has “the technical ability to build a nuclear bomb.” The statement was later walked back by the Iranian side but reflected a significant shift in tone from past statements that have been clearly against even the possibility of nuclear weapons development.

The Israeli and U.S. flags are projected on the wall of the old city of Jerusalem during President Biden’s visit on July 13, 2022.

Photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

Biden’s response to all these events has been the worst of all worlds: disappointing his pro-diplomacy base while failing to placate his political enemies.

The nuclear deal was the signature diplomatic agreement of the Obama administration, in which, of course, Biden served as vice president. Upon taking office, Biden had a strong political opportunity to snap back into U.S. compliance with the deal, the minimum terms of which the Iranians had continued upholding despite Trump’s maximum pressure campaign.

Instead, in apparent fear of angering his political opponents by looking weak, Biden declined to immediately reenter the agreement that was signed — something that Iranian officials indicated that they would’ve accepted once he took office. Due to domestic political pressures, Biden continued playing hardball instead of making a good-faith bid to reenter the deal. Now, it looks like he has nothing to show for any of it.

In the real world, outside of the funhouse-mirror debates of American politics, a nuclearized Iran is likely to seriously constrain U.S. decision-making in the region for generations to come.

The U.S. technically could wage a full-scale war against Iran that would eliminate or severely degrade the nuclear program, even possibly leading to the collapse of the Iranian state. Outside of a few particularly psychopathic corners of Washington, however, there is little appetite among U.S. elites for starting such a massive conflict. The American public is even less likely to support it. After two exhausting decades of fighting futile wars in the Middle East, the idea of starting yet another with a country over twice the size of Iraq would be politically radioactive for any president.

The U.S. is largely stuck now with a long-term mess of its own making. Negotiating with Iran was often depicted by U.S. leaders as doing a favor to the Islamic Republic. The reality, though, was that the deal served legitimate U.S. interests: preventing nuclear proliferation, while sparing Americans from another armed conflict in the region.

Contrary to the statements of longtime Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his backers in the U.S., who tend to dominate Israel lobby organizations, the deal also served the interests of Israel, according to Barak and many other current and former Israeli political and intelligence officials. Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo, of all people, has said that withdrawal from the deal was nothing less than a “tragedy.”

That tragedy is now becoming tangible reality — on Joe Biden’s watch. Although Trump started the process that brought us to this point, it was only thanks to Biden’s mixture of weakness and indecision that the world will now likely be faced with a Middle Eastern equivalent of North Korea, rather than a version of Iran, as envisioned by the nuclear deal, that may have become economically dependent on the West.

For this, Biden has only himself to blame. He hasn’t accomplished much as president, but it looks like Biden will have one legacy achievement to look back upon: fathering the Iranian nuclear bomb.

The post Proud Papa: How Joe Biden Became the Father of the Iranian Nuclear Bomb appeared first on The Intercept.
July 27, 2022

Russia-Ukraine War Is Propelling Us Into a New Age of Global Political Upheaval

Anti-government protesters take over the Prime Minister’s Office on July 13, 2022, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Photo: Thilina Kaluthotage/NurPhoto via Getty Images

When protesters stormed government buildings in Sri Lanka earlier this month, what we witnessed was less the culmination of a revolutionary process than the collapse of a developing country under economic stress. Sri Lankans were coping with higher food and energy prices for months. Once the government ran out of the foreign exchange reserves necessary to import basic necessities like food and gas, the pressure became too much to bear. The ruling party had mismanaged the economy for years, creating tensions that were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. What finally pushed Sri Lanka over the edge, though, was the economic shockwaves now being felt from the war in distant Ukraine. All signs suggest that it will not be the last country to fall.

The world is now facing a perfect storm of rising energy prices, supply chain disruptions, and armed conflict — all compounded by the lingering impacts of the pandemic. Despite millions of deaths from disease, the world managed to stave off the worst political crises that were feared when Covid first struck. It looks now like those fears were merely delayed.

“Some countries will cope and get through it, while other countries will have revolutions and coups. It will be very destabilizing.”

“Unlike previous energy crises that were solely about oil, this is a crisis about oil, gas, metal, coal, food, and many other commodities. Any country with high debt and significant exposure to these imports are threatened,” said Robin Mills, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and the CEO of Qamar Energy. “Some countries will cope and get through it, while other countries will have revolutions and coups. It will be very destabilizing, and I don’t think we’re at the worst of it yet.”

It may not have been widely appreciated before the current war, but Russia and Ukraine are superpowers in food production. The two countries collectively export 12 percent of all calories consumed worldwide, much of it in the form of wheat. Ukraine is the source of roughly 50 percent of all sunflower seed oil used on the global market, and disruptions of its critical exports have sent prices skyrocketing around the world.

A recent agreement signed between the two countries offered some hope that millions of tons of trapped grain could resume being exported to global markets, but almost as soon as the deal was signed, it was called into question by fresh Russian strikes against the port of Odessa. Countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Laos, Ecuador, and Nigeria are just a few that rely heavily on Russian and Ukrainian imports and are now at risk of food insecurity in the year ahead. In Somalia, over 90 percent of wheat is imported from Russian or Ukrainian sources.

“In addition to wheat and gas, Russia is also a big producer of fertilizer which it is going to be unable to export to other major agricultural powers like Brazil,” said Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Crunch time for food prices will really come next year, where we see elevated fertilizer prices mixed with the impact of heat waves from climate change reducing the size of harvests around the world.”

A fragment of a rocket in a wheat field in the Ukrainian Kharkiv region on July 19, 2022.

Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images

Bigger price shocks from oil and gas increases are also on the way. Germany is already discussing rationing gas during the coming winter as it struggles to pivot away from Russian supplies, which are helping fund Vladimir Putin’s war machine in Ukraine. Top European Union officials have already begun to warn of “very, very strong conflict and strife” on the continent if shortages continue, while Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock reportedly told her Canadian counterpart that the gas issue could “spark popular uprisings.”

These are undeniably tough times in Europe. The ripple effects on the developing world, however, are even worse. Pakistan is already facing massive rolling blackouts in its major cities after losing access to natural gas imports, as much available supply is being bought up by European countries trying to replace their own shortfalls. A recent $1 billion tender for gas by the Pakistani government received no offers, pushing Pakistan even closer to wholesale economic and political collapse as it struggles with debt and inflation.

The connections between war in Europe and suffering in Asia are crystal clear. “Every molecule of gas that was available in our region has been purchased by Europe because they are trying to reduce their dependence on Russia,” Pakistani State Minister for Petroleum Musadik Malik told the Wall Street Journal in a recent report. The minister’s comments were a grim reflection of the mechanics of global inequality, as well as a harbinger for the suffering that many other developing countries are likely to experience as the crisis rolls onwards without remedy.

Optimistic talk about a rising Asian century is all but disappeared. It has given way to grimmer discussions: how to prevent millions of people from falling into famine, and how fragile, heavily-armed states can avoid the ungoverned chaos that rocked many Middle Eastern countries over the past decade.

“A few years ago, there was a lot of attention to the idea that there was going to be a positive economic outlook for Eurasia as an integrated economic zone, connected through different economic mechanisms and infrastructure and that this would in turn benefit poorer countries. Those visions are no longer really viable,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, the founder of Bourse & Bazaar, a think tank focused on economic diplomacy and development in the Middle East and Central Asia. “The consumer markets that everyone thought were going to exist are not going to be there. Big consumer markets like Russian and Iran are going to be squeezed by sanctions, and poor countries in Eurasia are going to be squeezed by higher commodity prices.”

Central banks across the world have responded to price inflation by hiking interest rates on borrowing from their historic lows. The idea behind this strategy is to slow down economic activity in general, thus taking some of the purchasing pressure off commodity prices. This strategy is likely to run into serious challenges. Even if central banks manage to induce a global recession, prices are not likely to fall much as inflation is being driven as much by supply-side pressures as demand.

Armed conflict and political dysfunction are two major culprits here, and the United States has not been helping. Two of the major oil producers in Asia — Russia and Iran — are now effectively blocked from providing energy to global markets by U.S. sanctions. The former was cut off, understandably, as a result of the war in Ukraine, but the latter is banned from providing gas to the market because of the United States’ own decision to violate the terms of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Even if other countries around the world were willing to buy Russian and Iranian energy despite concerns over war and nuclear proliferation, few are willing to run the risk of incurring U.S. secondary sanctions that could block them from international banking channels.

Thoughts of building alternative financial channels to do trade, a long-held dream of nations opposed to U.S. hegemony, are also premature: There simply aren’t the legal and administrative mechanisms in place today to build an alternative economic system completely free of Western influence.

The net result of all of this is that — barring an unlikely future where Russia and Ukraine, as well as Iran and the United States, all come to terms peacefully — energy prices are going to continue their upward ascent. The pressures that this creates are likely to push more countries down the path of economic and social collapse that Sri Lanka has already tread.

“Even if we have a global recession and demand comes down, energy prices are likely going to remain elevated because we have two major energy producers off the market. And when energy costs are high, everything else becomes more expensive,” said Batmanghelidj. “Unfortunately, I do believe that we have reached a tipping point. Things are likely to get much worse until a new political reality emerges.”

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July 17, 2022

Biden to Saudi Arabia and Israel: Sure, Kill Our Journalists

President Joe Biden arrives at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 15, 2022.

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East is taking him to two countries whose governments are killers of American journalists.

On an international tour designed to improve tense relationships with two nominal allies, Biden met with Mohammed bin Salman, the authoritarian crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Bin Salman was judged by the CIA to have ordered the infamous murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident, in 2018 after the prince became enraged over Khashoggi’s criticisms. More recently, Israeli soldiers killed Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akhleh in a shooting in the West Bank that investigative journalists have said bore the signs of a targeted killing by Israeli forces.

Despite the evidence that these governments killed these journalists, Biden will not be reading anyone the riot act. Instead, the subtle message of Biden’s trip is one of impunity and shared conspiracy.

Biden claimed that his trip represents a continued commitment to upholding American values and interests, yet his administration has done nothing to hold those responsible for the murders of Khashoggi and Abu Akhleh to account. The purpose of this trip is rather to solidify the bonds of friendship between the governments of the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia while sweeping unpleasant subjects like dead journalists under the rug.

None of it is particularly surprising: It’d be inane at this point to merely say that the U.S. is hypocritical when it comes to human rights issues. The new dynamic at play today is that other countries notice these double standards and resist obvious moral blackmail.

Palestinians hold banners and pictures of Shireen Abu Akleh during a protest against President Joe Biden’s support for Israel in Ramallah, West Bank on July 15, 2022.

Photo: Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Model of Impunity

As a candidate, Biden won praise for vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for the outrageous crime of murdering a journalist at a major U.S. news publication. It was perhaps understandable that once in power he calculated that the relationship with oil-producing Saudi Arabia was too important to sacrifice for virtue.

By the same token, though, this makes it hard to lecture countries like India with a straight face to stop buying national gas from Russia over Russian human rights abuses in Ukraine. Telling Indians that they must suffer economic pain for principle in a manner that the United States itself will not is simply a nonstarter, and many Indian officials have said so.

The United States’ perceived moral reputation, which suffers when exposed by obvious hypocrisy and indulgence of undemocratic client states, is not just a matter of vanity. American soft power is an important force multiplier for getting other states to rally behind U.S.-led causes, including the war in Ukraine. Being unwilling to ask for accountability in the face of even the most brazen violations of stated American principles, up to and including extreme cases like the murder of U.S. citizens and journalists, makes it hard to convince other countries to join coalitions of the willing based on moral arguments.

Security forces make preparations for U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit in Bethlehem, West Bank on July 15, 2022.

Photo: Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

There are going to be more crises in the future, and the U.S. would love to rally an alliance of nations of the “free world” against a future threat such as China. American leaders might well win some support by pointing to shared material interests. At this point, however, if there are other countries that sincerely believe that the United States stands on principle against human rights violations, they are engaging in willful self-delusion.

The great strength of the U.S. was once that it was able to sway foreign public opinion simply through the charisma of its public image. An incompetent, morally flexible, and doddering president begging for the support of autocrats and apartheid-administering client states is a sad example of how badly that charisma has faded.

The post Biden to Saudi Arabia and Israel: Sure, Kill Our Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.
July 14, 2022

Biden’s Trip Is About Exiting the Middle East — but U.S. Might Get Pulled Back In

President Joe Biden sits in a virtual meeting with leaders of the so-called I2U2 group at a hotel in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022.

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Over the past few decades, trips by U.S. presidents to the Middle East have been accompanied by statements of strong strategic and moral purpose. George W. Bush went to the region with soaring promises to deliver “hope for millions across the Middle East.” Barack Obama’s first major trip was an attempt to rebuild trust with the millions who by that time were aghast at the outcome of Bush’s disastrous wars. Even Donald Trump went to the Middle East to rally support from Muslim leaders for fighting the Islamic State, as well as to sign flashy economic and strategic agreements with Arab leaders expected to boost the U.S. economy. They even let him touch an orb.

President Joe Biden’s current trip to the Middle East, though, raises more questions than it answers. Rather than announcing any major initiatives, Biden, who is on a four-day trip to Israel, the occupied West Bank, and Saudi Arabia, seems more like he is headed into the region in search of an exit from it.

The goal of a grand Pax Americana is finished. Biden is merely writing its obituary.

Having abandoned a generation-long effort to reshape the Middle East using American power, the United States under his presidency is now scaling back its ambitions to three very minimal goals: protecting Israel, protecting energy supplies in the Persian Gulf, and minimizing the threat of international terrorism.

The goal of a grand Pax Americana is finished. Biden is merely writing its obituary.

Biden has governed as politician of reduced expectations, and his humble Middle East policy reflects that. But there are signs that it might still give him dangerously more than he bargained for.

Prior to his departure, Biden published an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining the economic and political reasons for his visit. He was also placed in the awkward position of explaining to Post readers why he was backing down from his previous pledge to isolate Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, after the crown prince murdered a columnist from that same publication.

Biden’s article painted an unconvincing picture of a region that was becoming more stable and prosperous thanks to U.S. efforts. It was also notable, however, for how little he promised about the future. Biden reminded Americans that the Middle East had lots of oil and gas and that it would need to be protected, particularly during a period of global energy inflation.

Other than that, the only significant promise the president made was that his visit would help improve normalization efforts between Israel and the Gulf Arab states. Previous statements by U.S. presidents that they would be helping spread democracy or mediating an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict were nowhere to be seen.

He might experience success with these minimalist goals. There are strong signs that Saudi Arabia is beginning to take steps toward establishing formal ties with Israel, and Biden himself will be taking a symbolic flight between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on this trip. Staying in character, even this potentially historic move by Biden is about managing the decline of U.S. ambitions. The process of Arab-Israeli normalization, started under the Trump administration, will be less the basis of a new U.S.-led order fostering democracy and American values than a way of helping ease the United States out of the region entirely. Effective security cooperation between Israel and the Gulf Arab states would accomplish two U.S. objectives by improving Israeli security as well as the security of Persian Gulf energy resources.

Saudi Arabia and Israel seem likely to join forces under the broader Abraham Accords — the new round of Gulf-Israeli diplomatic deals — at some point, but it would be hard to sell an alliance between an absolute monarchy led by a murderer of journalists and a state practicing permanent apartheid as an inspiring achievement for democracy. Biden seems to lack the energy to even pretend.

The U.S. has compelling reasons to pivot away from the Middle East. The crisis in Ukraine is taking up much of its strategic attention, and a possible confrontation with China in East Asia already looms on the horizon. Yet ironically, even Biden’s plan to humble America’s role in the Middle East runs the risk of dragging him back in.

A key component of the U.S. plan to draw down from the Middle East was the Iran nuclear deal. That deal is now showing very clear signs of morbidity. The deal was violated by Trump, but Biden has shown little indication that he is willing or able to take the political steps necessary to revive it.

In an interview with Israeli press, Biden doubled down on designating a wing of the Iranian military as a terrorist organization — the issue that is said to be the major sticking point in bringing the deal back to life. Biden also said that he is willing to use armed force against Iran as a “last resort” if the Islamic Republic proceeds with developing its nuclear program outside the agreement. Events may wind up calling his bluff, however reluctantly his proclamations were issued.

The nuclear agreement was a last-ditch effort to avoid a major conflict with Iran that had been brewing for years. Obama spent significant political capital to get it signed, but Biden appears unwilling to do the same. The U.S. is now clearly on a trajectory for war.

Israel, for its part, has been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and assassination to stall the Iranian nuclear program. But setting it back in a significant way will only be possible with direct U.S. military assistance to target and destroy fortified nuclear facilities. The war that would ensue after such strikes threatens to dwarf anything since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, drawing in the entire region from Iran up to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Biden has been a weak president whose popularity among Americans has diminished across his tenure. His trip to the Middle East likely reflects a strategically diminished United States. After two decades of soaring dreams and promises, paid for in the blood of many, the U.S. president seems to just want a way out. Lacking the will to do what it takes to make a graceful exit, though, Biden may not even find that.

The post Biden’s Trip Is About Exiting the Middle East — but U.S. Might Get Pulled Back In appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
June 10, 2022

Iran Is Backing Out of the Nuclear Deal That U.S. Had Already Reneged On for Years

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shows journalists a camera like the ones Iran is removing from nuclear sites, during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna on June 9, 2022.

Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

The nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Iran in 2015 was based on a simple premise: In exchange for lifting economic sanctions, Iran’s nuclear energy program would be put under strict international surveillance. The deal made sense for both sides. Iran would get sanctions relief and the chance to integrate itself in the global economy, and the United States would get an off-ramp to avoid yet another costly war in the Middle East.

The agreement never really got a chance to take hold, however, because the U.S. broke its word. In a fit of personal pique at his predecessor — and with the encouragement of Israel and the Gulf Arab states — President Donald Trump violated the accord by unilaterally reimposing sanctions and waging a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at collapsing the Iranian economy.

The deal has been on life support ever since.

Now, the Iranians may be ready to pull the plug on this sick patient. This week, Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would be removing 27 cameras that monitor nuclear sites — cameras that were installed as part of the 2015 agreement. This move was described by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi as a “fatal blow” to the agreement, in a statement that also called on both sides to return to the deal.

Grossi is right that the nuclear deal may now be in its final days. But it would be wrong to attribute its death to this final step — which comes only after years of overt violations by the United States.

The U.S. and Iran now appear to be on a glide path to a conflict that no one wanted.

The U.S. and Iran now appear to be on a glide path to a conflict that no one wanted and that diplomats spent years of negotiations trying to avoid. When the deal was signed in 2015, it seemed these efforts had borne fruit. The successful push by hawks aiming to kill the agreement has now brought things to a breaking point. The original motive of the nuclear deal was to avoid a war over this issue that was already looming a decade ago. With no deal, we might again be hurtling toward exactly that war.

Under Trump, the Iranian government continued to partially comply with the nuclear deal in the hopes of reviving it if a Democratic administration came back into power. President Joe Biden did win the White House in 2020, but instead of going back to the deal, he has chosen to maintain the sanctions that Trump imposed — the very measures the nuclear deal was intended to lift.

The sanctions devastated the Iranian economy and drove millions of middle-class Iranians into poverty. If they are lifted in future — doubtful, at this point — it is still unlikely that Iran would ever get the investment from Western companies that it hoped to receive following the original deal. It’s clear now that U.S. sanctions on Iran could be reimposed with any shifting political winds in the U.S. That is a situation which makes it virtually impossible for foreign enterprises to invest there.

The Iranian side lost much when the deal was torpedoed. Now the international community is going to take a possible hit to its aim of stopping nuclear proliferation. The removal of some of the surveillance cameras at nuclear sites means that the world is moving closer to the murky status quo ante that existed before the 2015 nuclear deal.

Although Iran has not said it would build a bomb, whatever nuclear activities that it conducts now will be done with drastically diminished international oversight. The IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, has already said that it believes that Iran is only “weeks away” from having a significant enough quantity of enriched uranium to put them within reach of a bomb. The loss of their surveillance capacity now means Iran could cross that threshold without them even knowing.

“Today, the IAEA is ‘flying blind’ about the details of Iran’s activities because it is unable to retrieve surveillance data being stored on the agency’s cameras as a consequence of U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018,” said John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in a press release about the news of the camera removals. “These new steps mean the IAEA is losing more data every day and it will be harder to trace every aspect of Iran’s nuclear program should negotiators find a diplomatic off-ramp to escalation. Once again, the United States, and the world, are better off with the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program than without them.”

At first blush, it might make sense to blame Iran for the rapidly closing window of a revived nuclear deal. Yet to do so ignores the history of the deal and absolves the U.S. of its actions: Why should Iran be expected to continue its compliance during talks over a new deal while the U.S. has not taken any steps toward restoring its own compliance?

The removal of the cameras is another sign of the failures of Washington’s posture toward Iran. The Trump administration bet that it could simply strong-arm Iran into sacrificing its nuclear program without offering sanctions relief or any other concessions in return.

Even though Trump did not want to suffer the consequences of a full-scale conflict with Iran, his withdrawal from the deal has set up for exactly that outcome: The U.S. will continue to reap what Trump sowed. Although Biden served as vice president in an administration that had made the nuclear deal a diplomatic centerpiece, he has been unwilling to return to compliance in a manner that might salvage the agreement.

With nuclear monitoring now curtailed, the same hawks that have long pushed for attacking Iran’s nuclear program will continue to do so. Although Iran has little hope of coming out victorious in a direct confrontation with the U.S. and its allies, it has advanced ballistic missile capacity as well as proxies on standby in many countries. A war with Iran would mean casualties and suffering for the U.S. and its allies unlike any of the wars with nonstate actors that America has fought in the two decades since 9/11.

The U.S. will continue to reap what Trump sowed.

A new war in the Middle East is simply not worth it from the perspective of U.S. interests. The best-case scenario is a signed agreement that controlled Iran’s nuclear program, while giving the Iranians a piece of the global economic pie that would be theirs to lose. Obama himself calculated that such an outcome made the most sense for all involved. Due to the structural inability of the U.S. government, including the Biden administration, to stick to its signed diplomatic agreements, the war that Obama tried to avoid may yet break out.

The deal to avert confrontation was already in hand. We should remember, as costs of the conflict mount, that it was the U.S. that blew up the off-ramp.

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.
June 6, 2022

9/11 Families and Others Call on Biden to Confront Afghan Humanitarian Crisis

In the midst of the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Biden administration’s decision to seize Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves, an unlikely coalition of family members of 9/11 victims, Afghan diaspora organizations, and diplomats appointed by the former Afghan government are calling for the U.S. government to take urgent steps to help the Afghan economy. Meanwhile, the largest beneficiaries of President Joe Biden’s action are likely to be lawyers rather than 9/11 victims.

Releasing some of the funds to the Afghan central bank, those calling on the administration argue, would be a means of mitigating the catastrophe now playing out. Though billions of Afghan reserves are now earmarked for the potential benefit of a group of 9/11 victim families who had previously filed lawsuits against the Taliban, other families say that confiscating the savings of ordinary Afghans would be an inappropriate way of obtaining justice for their loved ones.

In an executive order issued in February, Biden ordered half of Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves to be set aside for some future undetermined use on behalf of the Afghan people, while ordering the other half to be used to settle lawsuits previously leveled by victims of 9/11 against the Taliban. The confiscation of these funds has meant that ordinary Afghans, already reeling from the collapse of the former government, are now facing a liquidity shock that has left many unable to withdraw cash or perform even basic financial transactions.

The impact of all this has devastated the country, already one of the poorest on Earth. The United Nations now estimates that roughly half of Afghans are currently facing acute hunger. Afghanistan’s fledgling middle class, many of whom were reliant on salaries tied to foreign aid agencies to survive, is being driven into dire poverty. A report compiled by a group of aid agencies estimates that as many as 120,000 Afghan children may have been married off to suitors for financial reasons by families desperate to survive.

Kelly Campbell, co-founder of the organization 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, recently led a delegation to Afghanistan to observe conditions in the country following the collapse of the government. As she described it, the impact of the economic crisis there was palpable, with the drying up of cash in the economy a major cause of the suffering.

“There are people waiting in bread lines and very poor children with malnutrition visible in public, but there are also many middle-class people rapidly falling into poverty. This is being driven in part because there’s no longer a functioning banking system and people are unable to access their salaries. It’s a problem that humanitarian aid alone is not going to be able to solve,” said Campbell. “The fact of the matter is that these reserves are the Afghan people’s money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong. The Afghan people are not responsible for 9/11, they’re victims of 9/11 the same way our families are. To take their money and watch them literally starve — I can’t think of anything more sad.”

“These reserves are the Afghan people’s money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong.”

The controversy over releasing the central bank reserves stems largely from concerns that the Taliban will use them to solidify their hold on the country. However, even officials who served under the former Afghan government say that the funds should be released as the property of the central bank, which is considered an independent entity from the governing regime in the country. The Taliban are not recognized today by the U.N. or any other country as the official government of Afghanistan, and Afghanistan continues to be represented at the U.N. by a diplomat, Naseer Ahmad Faiq, who was originally appointed by the prior regime. Faiq is now among those calling for the funds to be released to the central bank.

Faiq said that he supports compensation for 9/11 victims and that the international community should continue taking a tough line against the Taliban. But the freezing and confiscation of money owned by the Afghan central bank — and, by extension, ordinary Afghans — has simply compounded the injustice that has already taken place.

“The families and victims of 9/11 deserve sympathy and compensation. We share their agony, and of course they deserve justice. But the people of Afghanistan are also victims of terrorism. For the past 20 years they have been suffering the consequences of the war on terror,” Faiq said. “I am not fighting on behalf of the Taliban or their benefit, I’m representing the Afghan people. No Afghan was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and if their money remains frozen, especially at a time when they are suffering from war, poverty, and drought, it will worsen their conditions. The financial resources of ordinary Afghan citizens do not belong to the Taliban.”

Fighting for Legal Fees

The prospect of a financial windfall from the seized Afghan banking reserves has already set up battles between law firms and lobbyists claiming to represent different groups of plaintiffs affected by the attacks. The lawyers themselves involved in the cases stand to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees alone, amounting to upward of $525 million according to a conservative fee structure of 15 percent. Faced with the prospect of such a staggering payday, many lawyers involved have seemingly overcome any sympathy they might have felt for ordinary Afghans suffering from famine. Andrew Maloney, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler, one of the law firms now intervening to be included in a lawsuit that stands to benefit from the dispersal of funds, told his clients in a call reported by The Intercept, “The reality is, the Afghan people didn’t stand up to the Taliban. … They bear some responsibility for the condition they’re in.”

The spectacle of lawyers and lobbyists fighting over Afghanistan’s meager financial assets while the country is wracked by a devastating famine has angered many Afghan diaspora groups. Arash Azizzada, co-founder of the advocacy group Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, says that his organization has been calling for the Biden administration to act pragmatically to staunch the humanitarian crisis by releasing funds in small tranches — a measure that would give ordinary Afghans access to their bank accounts while allowing ongoing monitoring to make sure that money is not appropriated by the Taliban. The administration has not responded publicly to this proposal, even as the crisis continues and legal efforts to obtain some of the funds heat up.

“It is such a deep miscarriage of justice to cut a diplomatic deal to withdraw from Afghanistan in order to save American lives, and then seize the money of ordinary Afghan citizens on the way out,” Azizzada said. “Afghans are no strangers to injustice, but this is a particularly egregious act of misplaced violence. The people who made up Afghanistan’s middle class not long ago are now on the streets trying to sell vegetables to survive.”

A group of 47 victims of 9/11 known as the Havlish plaintiffs, who were awarded a court judgement in 2006, presently stand to benefit from the money frozen by the Biden administration from the Afghan reserves, though the number of those awarded could increase if other lawyers and lobbyists succeed in efforts to lay claim to the funds for clients.

Aidan Salamone’s father was killed in the 9/11 attacks when he was 4 years old. Though he supports the principle that 9/11 victims should be compensated, he says that the actions now being undertaken to freeze Afghanistan’s funds two decades after the attacks go against the spirit of the original lawsuits. He is now among those calling for the administration to act quickly to unfreeze the funds for the benefit of Afghan civilians.

“I think the Biden administration should have moved months ago to make sure that the entire $7 billion in funds were made available for the Afghan central bank to deal with the crisis there. September 11 families know very well what it’s like to have your life rocked by atrocity,” said Salamone. “To think that these lawsuits are actively contributing to other people suffering through famine-like conditions is really hard to stomach.”

The post 9/11 Families and Others Call on Biden to Confront Afghan Humanitarian Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
May 26, 2022

AR-15s Were Made to Explode Human Bodies. In Uvalde, the Bodies Belonged to Children.

A paratrooper holding an AR-15 crouches behind rocks while leading a patrol northeast of Saigon, Vietnam, on June 5, 1967.

Photo: AP

As parents waited in anguish for news about their children following the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, they received a chilling request from police. Officers asked for DNA samples from parents to help establish the identities of the children who had been killed in the massacre, the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

The request pointed to the obvious, horrifying conclusion that many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was likely impossible to identify their bodies.

How we got here should be obvious: the AR-15 rifle.

Much has been made of how easily the killer, Salvador Ramos, strode into a store and bought two AR-15s the week before the attack, an apparent birthday gift to himself. Anyone paying attention gets that the ease of purchase for such weapons — which are frequently used in mass killings — is an indication of how deep the gun problem in America runs.

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. The requests for DNA tests in Uvalde stand as a testament to the gun’s success, but the conclusion that the weapon excelled at blowing people apart was well documented by the U.S. military itself during early field tests.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. conducted a survey into the impact of the AR-15 and its use on the battlefield. To put it bluntly, the survey found that the weapon, chambered with same .223 caliber rounds that Ramos used in Uvalde, was exceedingly good at killing human beings.

A copy of the survey, which was published in a Gawker story by my now-colleague Sam Biddle in 2016, shows that Viet Cong fighters hit with the weapon were frequently decapitated and dismembered, many looking as though they had “exploded.” A field report documented how an AR-15 had blown up a man’s head and turned another’s torso into “one big hole.” The weapon was lauded by soldiers on the battlefield for its effectiveness at killing adversaries and even cutting through dense jungle forest.

Some of the reports on Viet Cong soldiers killed with the weapon read like a matter-of-fact recounting from a horror film: “Chest wound from right to left, destroyed the thoracic cavity,” said the description of one AR-15-inflicted wound. “Stomach wound, which caused the abdominal cavity to explode,” said another.

Though it has become available domestically in the years since, the weapon was made for war — no matter what the National Rifle Association says — and was noted even at the time as being a significant escalation in the lethality of rifles.

It is hard to comprehend a weapon like this being used against small children in an elementary school. The impact of the AR-15, a tool designed not just for killing but for ripping apart adult human bodies in the most extreme manner, being turned on the small, delicate limbs and organs of young children does not need to be imagined. The parents waiting outside the school in Uvalde for news of their loved ones who were asked for DNA tests were being clued into something horrifying about the types of weapons floating around American society, so easily available that even a disturbed 18-year-old could get his hands on them.

In the aftermath of mass shootings targeting children, it is sometimes suggested that the public should be allowed to see the bodies. The impact of seeing actual flesh-and-blood children killed by assault rifles might shake the sensibilities of Americans enough that they enact serious changes to gun control laws that would make it less likely that AR-15s would be used again for such massacres.

Public aside, however, the reality is that the government has known for a long time what these weapons do. It has been sending AR-15s to wars abroad for decades and has documented in graphic detail the exploded and mangled corpses left behind. That such knowledge exists, and yet AR-15s are still commercially available for use by civilians in this country, tells you all you need to know about what pro-gun politicians are willing to tolerate.

The horrifying reality, which we all know, is that there will be another Uvalde sooner or later. The AR-15 is a demon that was unleashed on foreigners during wartime and has now returned as a demon to victimize innocent Americans, including the most innocent among us. A machine designed for the mass killing and maiming of other people — a design that had nothing to do with hunting or sportsmanship — should not be on American streets. At the minimum, no one in public life should be allowed to deny what it really does.

The post AR-15s Were Made to Explode Human Bodies. In Uvalde, the Bodies Belonged to Children. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
May 17, 2022

Racist “Replacement” Conspiracy Is Undergirded by a Real Resource Scarcity

Alexis Rodriguez, of Buffalo, lights candles as people gather at the scene of a racist mass shooting at Tops Friendly Market in a historically Black neighborhood of Buffalo, N.Y., on May 16, 2022.

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

Before he walked into the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, on a mission to murder as many innocent Black shoppers as he could, 18-year-old Payton Gendron posted a rambling manifesto online outlining his motives.

His reasoning was familiar from other far-right shooters: This country isn’t going to be resource-rich enough for everyone in the future, so a race war over what is left is necessary today. However heinous, this vision of a bleak, impoverished future, in which there is not enough wealth to go around and the environment is near collapse, is motivating an ever-growing number of young men like him to carry out racist massacres across the West.

Addressing this violence requires considering the role of scarcity — not a conspiracy theory, but a very real system of extreme inequality and ecological destruction.

People who commit acts of terrorism tend to act for more than one reason. The racist hatred of Gendron toward Black Americans, Jews, and immigrants was ultimately what made his murders possible. For that, many are to blame, including far-right politicians and talking heads who have continued to wink at the “great replacement” as being the true source of white Westerners’ troubles.

Addressing this violence, though, also requires considering the role of scarcity — not a conspiracy theory, but a very real system of extreme inequality and ecological destruction. It is a system in which the most wealthy and powerful continue to see their wealth and power grow — at the expense of the masses. Faced with actual strained resources and environmental calamity, some of these forsaken people are turning to dark fantasies like the “great replacement theory” to make sense of it all.

This is not just about a toxic media ecosystem, but the larger way we have organized our lives in the West. This organizational structure could go by many names — neoliberalism, consumer capitalism, exploitation — but there can be little doubt that the pessimism it engenders is leading many young people into nihilism.

Faced with a shrinking economic pie and disastrous climate situation, many young people are now convinced that the world they become adults in will be poorer, more polluted, and less hopeful than that enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. It should not be surprising, then, that the appeal of apocalyptic ideologies is taking hold. The problems of economics and the environment are real, but the scapegoating is where the conspiracies come in: It doesn’t take much to convince those already gloomy about their futures that the real culprits are immigrants and minorities.

That Gendron is a racist barely needs stating. His manifesto shows no concern for the humanity of nonwhite people, describing them as a pestilence to be eradicated from Western countries. He even advocates killing nonwhite children, arguing that if they are allowed to live, they will simply spawn more “replacers” — a nod to the “great replacement theory” of demographic change promoted by other far-right shooters, which claims that white people are being inflicted with a “genocide” caused by low birthrates and immigration.

If there is a major theme besides racism that runs through Gendron’s manifesto, it is simple pessimism about the future. In his writings, he concluded that the future of the U.S. will be one of economic decay and environmental collapse. With such a dire perspective, along with a belief that other races and ethnic groups are both inferior to white people and their natural enemies, his actions followed naturally from his worldview.

We should all be disturbed that he is clearly not alone in believing what he does.

Bullet holes are seen in the window of Tops Friendly Market at Jefferson Avenue and Riley Street, as federal investigators work the scene of a mass shooting on May 16, 2022 in Buffalo, NY..

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

People who would never dream of carrying out such a crime — and who have no sense of hatred for other races — feel similarly bleak about the future. A recent study by UNICEF found that a majority of 15- to 24-year-olds in high-income countries had concluded that with wage stagnation, they will be worse off economically than their parents were.

It’s not that there aren’t enough resources to go around in the U.S., but it feels that way to many when a relatively small number of people have been hoarding the wealth. At this point, it’s almost cliché to point out that in the U.S. the 1st percentile of earners have seen their wealth explode over the past several decades, while that of the bottom 50 percent of the country has remained completely stagnant.

Then there’s the alarming state of the natural environment. The total failure of political elites and the wealthy to combat the climate crisis is fueling despair among the young about whether they will even have a future at all. Although environmentalism is usually associated with the left today, the right has a long history of using concerns about ecological destruction as a recruiting tool. The politics of fear could easily leverage this as a major issue again, making it into a mass appeal to the disaffected; in the mass shooters, we are already seeing it happen on the fringes.

If we really want to see fewer tragedies like the racist murders in Buffalo, we need to combat the nihilism at the core of the shooter’s worldview.

A recent global survey found that over three-quarters of young people felt that the future would be frightening because of climate change, while fully 56 percent said that they thought humanity was “doomed.” The conviction that our political choices have doomed us to a future apocalypse is leading to a mental health crisis among young people in the U.S. and beyond.

At the same time, even liberal politicians who pay lip service to the issue seem unwilling or unable to do anything to deliver a plausible picture of a better environmental future. In his manifesto, Gendron went on about the “continued destruction of the natural environment” while concluding that racist murder was an acceptable way to help stop it.

If we really want to see fewer tragedies like the racist murders in Buffalo, we need to combat the nihilism at the core of the shooter’s worldview. Fighting racism itself is going to be a part of that effort. If wealth was not so concentrated, however, or if politicians acted as though the climate crisis really mattered, there would be a smaller reservoir of nihilistic youths for right-wing extremists to recruit from in the first place.

The people with power in the U.S. today — whose wealth has skyrocketed even as their fellow citizens’ prospects darken — have the power to do a lot to change that mindset. An end to the class warfare that has enriched the wealthiest sliver of Americans while the rest suffer the ravages of stagnant wages, addiction, and family breakdown would be a good start. If the outlook for the future for young people doesn’t get brighter, with more wealth to share and a climate capable of supporting life, we are going to see many more acts of mass murder in the future — accompanied by the release of pitiful, imitative manifestos like that Gendron posted before wasting his life to take others’.

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April 29, 2022

Palestinian Poem Sets Off Antisemitism Fight at Georgetown

Controversy erupted this week over a young Palestinian activist’s invitation to speak at Georgetown Law School. In advance of the event, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, accused 23-year-old Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd of being antisemitic — an allegation that was echoed by conservative media outlets. Though the event on Tuesday went ahead as planned, Georgetown has come under pressure in the media, as well as from some students and faculty, to condemn El-Kurd and disavow the event.

The war of words began a few days before the Georgetown event, when Jonathan Greenblatt, the liberal head of the ADL, shared a dossier accusing El-Kurd of antisemitism based on a selection of his tweets and past writing. Most of the accusations were based on social media posts from El-Kurd loudly chastising Israel and Zionism.

One item from the ADL dossier, however, has become the centerpiece of the campaign against the writer: a line from a poem he wrote that is now being alleged to echo a medieval antisemitic trope known as the “blood libel,” an accusation originated in medieval Europe that Jews consumed the blood of non-Jews for ritual purposes.

The passage in question came from El-Kurd’s book of poetry published last year, “Rifqa.” In one of the poems, El-Kurd, who denies the charges of antisemitism, wrote, “They harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.”

The line includes one of the few footnotes in the volume of poetry, directing the reader to a decade-old news story in which the Israeli government admitted to harvesting organs from bodies of Palestinians, as well as some Israelis, without their families’ consent in the 1990s.

El-Kurd denied that the line from the poem had anything to do with the “blood libel” trope, saying in an interview that until very recently he had not been familiar with it. “When I wrote this poem, I was like 14 or 15 years old,” El-Kurd said. “I literally only understood what blood libel was like two months ago. I’d never in my life even heard of this concept.”

The allegation of antisemitism against El-Kurd based on the poem is the only one that has gained traction. That his accusers are relying on a relatively obscure accusation — a distant echo of an antisemitic trope from the European Middle Ages — as the main ammunition against El-Kurd is raising questions among advocates for Palestinian rights about the responsibilities of Israel’s critics to have an almost-scholarly grasp of antisemitism and its history.

“I’m far more familiar with the history of antisemitism and the history of prejudice against Jewish people than I am about the history of prejudices against many, many other peoples because that is what is necessary to engage on this subject in the United States,” said Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. “At the same time, people who make arguments in favor of Israeli policies never seem to be subjected to the same minefield related to sensitivities over Palestinian history and suffering. That clear double standard is one the ADL seems dedicated to reinforcing.”

An email obtained by The Intercept, signed by a group of Jewish students and faculty members at Georgetown, and addressed to the school administration, called for the school to condemn El-Kurd’s presence at the Tuesday event. The letter stated that his writing had used “a foul antisemitic trope, originating in the Middle Ages, that claims that Jews use the blood of gentiles for ritual or culinary purposes.”

The critical letter was followed by a statement supporting El-Kurd from a group of Georgetown Law alumni led by Palestinian American legal scholar Noura Erakat. El-Kurd’s supporters reviewed the blood libel accusation in the poem and rejected the charge, stating that “the literal interpretation of what is clearly figurative speech appears to be done in bad faith.”

The letter of support also argued that the controversy over the poem was changing the subject: discussions about Palestinians’ actual living conditions in the Occupied Territories were being supplanted by debates over wording. “The cause of Palestinian liberation is buried under bad faith interpretations of El-Kurd’s poetry. A single metaphorical line, subject to interpretation, becomes prioritized over the vile condition of Palestinian unfreedom,” it said.

El-Kurd told The Intercept that his poem was referring to the documented historical event in Israel-Palestine cited in the footnotes. He also said that as a teenager learning to write poetry, his teachers had encouraged him to use metaphorical language.

“It’s a metaphor, it’s not something I literally believe. I’m just now realizing that they actually think, or are pretending to think for purposes of exaggeration, that I actually believe Israelis eat Palestinian organs. At first it was comical, but now it seems very sinister,” El-Kurd said. “The line is about the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies and using them as bargaining chips and in the past, exploiting the bodies in ways that have been documented and are widely discussed. It’s not a conspiracy theory.”

He added, “At the time I wrote it, I was writing more literally about the practice of withholding bodies, but my teachers told me to make it more abstract and to use artistic language.”

El-Kurd said that the ADL never reached out or attempted to engage him about concerns that the group had with his writing. (The ADL did not respond to a request for comment.) Instead, with the dossier and the campaign to get his event at Georgetown canceled, the ADL has focused on trying to push him out of the public debate on Israel-Palestine entirely.

There’s no denying that El-Kurd grew up angry. A young Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, he has spent his entire life fighting against the Israeli government’s attempt to evict him and his neighbors from their homes.

When he was 11 years old, a group of hard-line Israeli settlers, including some with origins in the U.S., moved into a portion of his family home and tossed his family’s possessions into the street. The settlers have remained there ever since. To this day, they are pushing to evict his family entirely. His involvement on Israel-Palestine issues has been forced by circumstances that have shaped his life since childhood.

People who have worked in advocacy on Israel-Palestine also point out that it’s unreasonable to expect a 23-year-old to know how to navigate sophisticated speech codes around the conflict in the United States, or to immediately tar them as antisemites if they don’t.

“There are elaborate and ever-shifting speech codes that are constantly retrofitted to try and equate any form of Palestinian criticism of Zionism with antisemitism.”

“There are elaborate and ever-shifting speech codes that are constantly retrofitted to try and equate any form of Palestinian criticism of Zionism with antisemitism,” Munayyer said. “Those of us who operate in the American debate around this issue are forced to be very aware of the many ways that one’s legitimate criticism of Zionism can be misconstrued in bad faith as antisemitic speech.”

The ADL dossier that triggered the uproar against El-Kurd does acknowledge that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely personal for El-Kurd” and that his family has been “entangled in a long-standing political and property dispute that has left them under threat of eviction by Israel for years.”

Under Greenblatt’s leadership, the ADL has taken liberal stances on some issues. The group has even taken steps to make amends for some past controversies: In 2021, Greenblatt issued a public apology for the ADL’s decision to oppose the construction of a mosque in Lower Manhattan, saying on behalf of the organization, “We were wrong, plain and simple.” Greenblatt has also stridently called out Donald Trump and the far right, something for which he has been attacked by conservatives.

The controversy over El-Kurd may make it harder for even a rebranded ADL to make new allies. Many progressives today are sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and the knee-jerk attempt to “cancel” El-Kurd, including with a coordinated media blitz, is unlikely to endear them to the ADL.

For his part, El-Kurd says that the attacks on him, which characterize his expressions of outrage as bigotry, paint a one-sided picture that doesn’t reflect the real-world violence that he and his family suffer at the hands of the Israeli settler movement and the government that supports it.

“My family is threatened by expulsion every day, and all I’ve ever known is life under Israeli occupation,” El-Kurd said. “All I’ve known is tear gas and beatings and police abuse.”

The post Palestinian Poem Sets Off Antisemitism Fight at Georgetown appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
April 28, 2022

As Screws Tighten on Russia, a Warning About Civilian Harm of Sanctions

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, he didn’t seek a democratic mandate. Russia has an authoritarian regime, in which one man and his lieutenants run the show. The diverse views of over 140 million citizens of the Russian Federation — spanning a huge number of ethnicities and languages, not to mention geography — mean little when it comes to foreign policy choices.

Yet when Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine, the U.S. and its European allies turned to a familiar weapon, one that indiscriminately targets all Russian citizens rather than just those responsible for the crimes we are seeing today: broad-based economic sanctions.

In recent years, sanctions have become a favored tool of U.S. policymakers, used as a modern form of siege warfare but with lower domestic political costs than sending U.S. troops abroad. In addition to sanctions targeting oligarchs and the Russian high-tech and defense sectors, the U.S. and its allies have gone for the jugular by attempting to tank the entire Russian economy.

Russia is staying afloat for now, thanks to continuing sales of its natural gas reserves, but the stories of a handful of other countries hold a cautionary tale for the West about the potential human costs of sanctions to ordinary citizens.

A public letter from a coalition of advocacy groups today called on the Biden administration to revisit its use of economic sanctions and deliver on its promise to reform this area of foreign policymaking. The letter pointed to countries like Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Venezuela that are suffering economic collapse and even famine under the pressure of sanctions and blockades by the U.S. and its allies.

“Many policymakers view sanctions as a politically expedient alternative to war, but the fact is broad sanctions are economic warfare that punishes innocents,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, one of the groups that spearheaded the letter. “The human costs suffered by the hundreds of millions of people under U.S. sanctions are an unacceptable collateral damage, and it’s past time for serious efforts to reform our sanctions regime.”

The letter was organized primarily by advocacy groups created by diaspora communities from countries where sanctions have impoverished the populations while doing little to change the undemocratic regimes they live under. Alongside the National Iranian American Council, the diaspora groups that signed the letter include Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, Oil for Venezuela, the Korea-focused group Women Cross DMZ, and the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. Other foreign policy advocacy groups also added their names to the letter, including the Washington, D.C.-based Win Without War and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The advocacy groups’ letter briefly outlines the impact of sanctions on civilians in a range of countries, while chastising President Joe Biden for only paying lip service to the problem of humanitarian crises caused in whole or in part by Western sanctions.

“We recognize that the Biden administration initiated a comprehensive review of U.S. sanctions policies last year, setting out a general goal of minimizing humanitarian impacts and supporting humanitarian trade to heavily-sanctioned jurisdictions,” the letter said. “However, this guidance has not been followed by concrete and comprehensive steps to deliver relief and open up humanitarian trade. As a result, the U.S. government has failed to significantly alter course and continues to enforce policies that fuel humanitarian and public health disasters.”

The Biden administration’s review of sanctions policy was heavily criticized last year for failing to recommend any concrete policy proposals, let alone legislative changes, that would protect innocent civilians from being harmed by sanctions today or in the future.

Examples of the harmful impacts of sanctions on civilians — and their failure to sway authoritarian leaders — are not hard to find.

In the 1990s, the U.S. imposed a crushing sanctions regime against Iraq following the war in Kuwait. The measures immiserated ordinary Iraqis while allowing Saddam Hussein to further consolidate his grip on society. Today middle classes in places like Iran have fallen into destitution because of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian economy and central bank. In Afghanistan, following last year’s collapse of the central government, the U.S. not only cut off critical aid but also confiscated its banking reserves, leading to a liquidity crisis in the poorest country on Earth and ultimately to reports of starvation. Under a blockade led by U.S. allies, Yemen has similarly faced mass outbreaks of disease and malnutrition.

Sanctions reform is not a particularly popular subject. Oftentimes, as in the case of Russia today, countries subject to broad sanctions truly are unsavory or engaged in behavior that needs to be stopped.

The problem, though, is that untargeted sanctions that punish civilian populations have been a poor means of making foreign governments change their policies. While elites in sanctioned countries usually find a way to get what they need, ordinary people find themselves sent into poverty — victimized by economic blockades that U.S. politicians treat as open-ended.

“Only by grappling with the full impact of sanctions can the U.S. ensure that sanctions don’t exacerbate the plight of ordinary citizens and serve, rather than undermine, U.S. interests.”

Even in the case of Russia today, there is an argument to be made that lowering the sanctions pressure on ordinary Russians and increasing arms supplies to Ukraine would be both a more humanitarian and strategically effective way to end the war.

Calls for sanctions policy reform are likely to get more strident as the U.S. continues to escalate its use of this policy tool. While the Biden administration has engaged in some symbolic attempts at reform, millions of people who are not guilty of any crime against Americans continue to suffer around the world today from U.S. sanctions regimes.

“The United States must lead by example, overhaul U.S. sanctions, and ensure that sanctions are targeted, proportional, connected to discrete policy goals and reversible. This would necessarily result in an end to unjust collective punishment of civilian populations around the globe who have little control over governmental decision making,” the advocacy groups’ letter said. “Only by grappling with the full impact of sanctions can the U.S. ensure that sanctions don’t exacerbate the plight of ordinary citizens and serve, rather than undermine, U.S. interests.”

The post As Screws Tighten on Russia, a Warning About Civilian Harm of Sanctions appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
April 21, 2022

Joe Biden Deserves the Blame for Killing the Iran Nuclear Deal

President Joe Biden speaks in Greensboro, N.C., on April 14, 2022.

Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In a short video clip that went viral across the globe this week, President Joe Biden concluded a speech in North Carolina with a stirring call for unity among Americans. Then he turned away from the podium and appeared to reach into thin air for a handshake. The clip amused Biden’s many detractors, who allege that the U.S. president is suffering from cognitive decline, though others dispute that interpretation of the video.

Whether or not it was a sign of his deteriorating mental acuity, the image of Biden seeming to shake hands with no one is an apt metaphor for his administration’s many diplomatic failures since coming to office. At the top of the list is Biden’s inability to achieve his basic aim of reentering the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. That’s where the handshake comes in: It looked as if Biden was pronouncing himself ready to enter into an agreement, but with no one on the other end. While there have been questions about the functioning of Biden’s brain following such incidents, what really may be plaguing the president is a lack of heart.

In 2018, President Donald Trump exited the Iran nuclear agreement in a fit of pique aimed at undermining a key diplomatic achievement of President Barack Obama. Biden initially campaigned on a pledge to return to a deal that places Iran’s nuclear program under strict controls in exchange for sanctions relief.

It should have been an easy win, reversing a dangerous foreign policy decision made on a whim by Trump. However, more than a year into his presidency, Biden has utterly failed to find his way back into the deal. Instead of preserving one of the major diplomatic accomplishments of the Obama administration, in which he served as vice president, Biden is effectively siding with Trump’s position. The nuclear agreement is now on the brink of collapsing entirely — and the blame for it lies squarely with Biden.

The impasse in the current talks, according to reports, is an issue that Trump injected into the diplomatic mix exactly to prevent his successor from reviving the deal: the listing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

The 2019 listing of the group by Trump was not directly tied to the nuclear deal — he had already abandoned the agreement — but it made the deal virtually impossible to revive.

The benefit that the nuclear deal was intended to provide Iran was foreign investment and trade to rescue the Islamic Republic’s flagging economy. For better or worse, the IRGC is a major economic player in Iran, and treating it as a terrorist organization makes it highly unlikely that Western companies will feel comfortable doing business in the country at all.

In other words, making the IRGC a terror group effectively blocks whatever gains Iran would hope to make from cutting a deal in the first place. Reviving the agreement becomes a nonstarter — just as Trump planned.

Iran has demanded as part of the talks that the IRGC be removed from the terrorist list before reentering the deal. The Biden administration has refused, saying that if the group is to be removed, Iran will have to make additional concessions outside the nuclear deal, which is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“If Iran wants sanctions-lifting that goes beyond the JCPOA, they’ll need to address concerns of ours that go beyond the JCPOA,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said, when asked about the Revolutionary Guards’ possible delisting at a press conference Monday. “They will need to negotiate those issues in good faith with reciprocity.”

Price didn’t swear off delisting the IRGC, but in response to questions, he said that the United States “will use every appropriate tool to confront the IRGC’s destabilizing role in the region, including working closely with our partners in Israel.” Several U.S. allies in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, are believed to be lobbying against a revived deal. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett reportedly hopes that the IRGC listing will be a “deal breaker” that prevents a return to the agreement.

Placing the IRGC on the terrorist list is mainly symbolic from the U.S. perspective. Iran is already designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, and the IRGC is subject to numerous sanctions that remain in effect regardless of whether it is specifically listed. The IRGC listing does, however, have serious repercussions for ordinary Iranians and even dual nationals of Western countries who were raised in Iran. The IRGC operates on a conscription basis and draws recruits from across Iranian society.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iranians are now potentially on the U.S. terrorist watchlist and likely to remain there as a long as the organization they served in is considered a terror group by the U.S. In addition to the economic concerns around sanctions, Iran thus has a strong motivation for seeing the IRGC, which is ultimately a branch of its military, delisted as part of any broader agreement.

“As far as the Iranians are concerned, there is definitely an element of pride where they don’t want to have a major branch of their military listed as a terrorist organization,” said Hooman Majd, author of “The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay.” “Just as importantly, the JCPOA was also supposed to bring sanctions relief to Iran. That was not just relief in the sense that the Iranian central bank wouldn’t be sanctioned anymore; the deal was also specifically supposed to encourage foreign investment in Iran.”

“There is definitely an element of pride where they don’t want to have a major branch of their military listed as a terrorist organization.”

Majd was privy to discussions around the original JCPOA negotiation and believes that the Iranian government may walk away from a renewed agreement if it calculates that sanctions on the IRGC will prevent it from reaping the expected economic benefits.

“When other sanctions were placed on Iran in the 1990s, the IRGC became the de facto engineering arm of the Iranian government,” he said. “Everything down to the international airport in Tehran is run by the IRGC, and every aspect of business in Iran has some connection to the IRGC or former members of the IRGC. If the IRGC is listed as a terrorist organization, is Boeing going to sell them planes?”

The Iran nuclear deal was intended as a last best shot at avoiding another major crisis in the Middle East. Given the Trump administration’s obvious violation of a deal that the U.S. had signed with the support of its allies, Biden could have easily reentered the agreement upon taking office.

Instead, the U.S. waffled. It now risks restarting a conflict that the Obama administration had expended significant diplomatic and political capital to avert. Most tragic will be the fact that it was easily avoidable.

Biden may not have been grasping at the air following his speech in North Carolina earlier this week. If he fails to bring the U.S. back into an agreement in line with its own signed commitments on the Iran nuclear deal, though, the image of him aimlessly searching for a hand to shake will be symbolic of his own presidency.

The post Joe Biden Deserves the Blame for Killing the Iran Nuclear Deal appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
April 16, 2022

At the Height of Putin’s Aggression, Marine Le Pen Victory Would Threaten European Alliances

A damaged and torn official campaign poster of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, and a tagged official campaign poster of French President Emmanuel Macron, of La République En Marche, are displayed on billboards next to a polling station on April 2, 2022, in Paris.

Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

The outcome of France’s upcoming presidential vote is gearing up to have a major impact on European security at a time when the continent finds itself back at war. The runoff vote, scheduled for April 24, pits the incumbent centrist President Emmanuel Macron against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally party stands near the precipice of coming to power for the first time in its history.

Le Pen, well known for her unfavorable views on immigrants and minorities in France, has made nativism a core campaign message. What may end up being even more consequential for the future of the entire continent, though, is Le Pen’s warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin: the man responsible for igniting the worst conflict in Europe since the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

Since Putin launched his brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine two months ago, France has been a stalwart member of the coalition against Russia. Under Macron, it has helped build the international sanctions regime against Russia and participated in supporting Ukraine’s defense through NATO. If Le Pen, whose hostility to the European Union and sympathy with Putin are a matter of public record, comes to office, those initiatives are likely to be rolled back.

The cozy ties between Le Pen and Putin have been nurtured even as the latter has emerged as a menace to European security. In 2017, Le Pen visited the Kremlin where she criticized EU sanctions on Russia following its annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, reportedly calling the measures “unfair and silly.” She later defended Putin to French media, claiming that the annexation was legal — a dubious assertion — and reflected the will of the people of the region. Le Pen has long argued for closer ties with Russia on ideological grounds. She even came under fire for taking loans from a politically connected Russia bank to fund her party’s political operations in France.

Given Le Pen’s past, there is little reason to think that she will hold back on realigning France away from multilateral European institutions and towards Russia. Such a move would arguably be the most consequential change in the European security system since the end of World War II and would happen at a moment when Europe finds itself more threatened than ever by a resurgent Russia.

“I think that if Le Pen won, our national security would be put at stake.”

“I think that if Le Pen won, our national security would be put at stake,” said Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French legal scholar and a Ph.D. candidate in comparative law at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole. “France would find itself marginalized both inside Europe and around the world. Alliances with our allies would be weakened or broken, and we would find ourselves aligning instead with undemocratic countries with whom we should not be aligning.”

She went on, “Le Pen has an ideological fascination with Putin, as well as financial ties in Russia. She’s a Eurosceptic so France would naturally lose its position as one of the leaders of the EU. If she won, we should expect that France will pay a serious price in its foreign relations.”

It is one thing for small eastern European states like Hungary or Serbia to be pro-Russia; for a major EU power like France to take such a position would be another matter entirely. Le Pen has been circumspect on specific actions, but if her expressed views guide her policies as president, France’s major alliances would be reordered under her leadership.

Like many other far-right leaders on the continent, Le Pen is hostile to the EU, describing it as a drag on France’s sovereignty. Le Pen has already signaled that she would take French troops out of NATO’s integrated command — where various national armies contribute to a force led by generals answering to the alliance. Though she has so far denied any intention to remove France entirely from NATO or the EU, observers say that Le Pen is merely biding her time until she controls the levers of power in Paris.

The skepticism of these major alliances is of a piece with her relationship to Russia. She has called for reconciliation between Europe and Putin, in stark contrast to other European leaders who have been galvanized in hostility toward Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Le Pen has pushed back against calls to cut off purchases of Russian gas, warning that such a move would be suicidal for French businesses, even while other European countries have announced plans to phase out purchases from Russia in the coming years.

Her public comments have put her well at odds with other European leaders who have maintained a nearly united front against Russia’s aggression. At a time when the unity of EU countries has been challenged in a most dramatic fashion by the war, the opportunity to break off a key member of the European alliance against Russia would be a tremendous strategic win for Putin.

A win for Le Pen could be a boon to Russia’s geopolitical aims in other, more subtle ways. French society remains heavily polarized, along not just political but ethnic lines. Le Pen’s election would be certain to heighten those divisions. Those are the sorts of dynamics actors like Russia have frequently sought to exploit toward their own ends, namely weakening Western Europe. Le Pen’s victory could give Putin an opening by cleaving France along its societal fault lines.

The opportunity to break off a key member of the European alliance against Russia would be a tremendous strategic win for Putin.

For observers like Alouane, an explosion of internal turmoil in France could push the country into the sort of right-wing politics seen, for instance, in Hungary, where pro-Putin President Viktor Orban has used reactionary politics to help solidify his hold on power.

“If she wins, there will certainly be mass protests,” said Alouane, of Le Pen. “Implementing a state of emergency in France is not difficult at this stage, and there is a real possibility that following her election we could turn into a Viktor Orban-style illiberal state.”

While Macron still has a slight lead over Le Pen in head-to-head polls, his victory is far from assured. The French would do well to recognize that not just the future of France is at stake, but also the future of Europe.

The post At the Height of Putin’s Aggression, Marine Le Pen Victory Would Threaten European Alliances appeared first on The Intercept.

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April 6, 2022

Conscription Into Revolutionary Guards Haunts Iranian Dual Nationals Decades Later

As he took his seat in an interrogation room at Calgary International Airport, Moe Toghraei felt little cause for alarm. A wastewater management engineer based in Madison, Wisconsin, he had returned to Canada, where his wife and children lived, for a few weeks last October for a routine visit. Now, he was heading back to Wisconsin for work.

Travelers to the U.S. from the Calgary airport go through customs and passport control at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at their point of departure, in Canada, before boarding. Toghraei, 53, a Canadian citizen of Iranian background, had gone through this process many times before without incident.

He sat quietly in the room waiting alongside a handful of others who had been marked for secondary inspection. He assumed he had been flagged because of a computer glitch or some kind of random selection that would involve a few extra questions before traveling. When his name was called, Toghraei — short, soft-spoken, with glasses and a salt-and-pepper goatee — walked to the desk at the front of the room to speak with the agent.

After Toghraei confirmed his name and a few other details, the agent got to the point: “Where did you do your military service?”

He immediately became tense. “I’d never been asked such a thing before at a border crossing,” he later recalled. “When they asked me that question, I began to think that something must be seriously wrong.”

“I was just doing my mandatory military service as a young man and I didn’t have the freedom to choose.”

Young men in Iran, where Toghraei was born and raised before immigrating to Canada roughly two decades ago, must do a two-year period of mandatory military service. Toghraei was no exception. Conscripted in his early 20s, he was assigned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known in Iran as the Sepah. In the IRGC, Toghraei worked a desk job translating documents related to water management. Now, he was suddenly being asked about his decades-ago assignment by a U.S. government official. “When they asked me specifically what branch of the military,” Toghraei said, “I told them honestly that my unit was in the Sepah.”

In 2019, amid a campaign to raise pressure on the Iranian government, the Trump administration officially labeled the IRGC a terrorist organization. The designation was likely why Toghraei found himself being interrogated despite never facing trouble before.

A rotating group of customs agents pressed for more details about his IRGC service: what type of uniform he wore, who he worked with, and what type of training he received. Toghraei said he answered questions honestly: He translated documents and didn’t wear a uniform. Had he used weapons? Only for basic rifle training in the first few days of his service. “He even asked me things like the name of my boss in Iran and where my office was located,” Toghraei said. “I said honestly again that I couldn’t remember such things. This all happened decades ago. Even I had forgotten the details.”

The agents became frustrated with his answers. After a while, Toghraei said, their demeanor turned hostile.

Eventually, he missed his flight. “I was just doing my mandatory military service as a young man and I didn’t have the freedom to choose,” Toghraei recalled telling his interrogators. “I told them I had been to the U.S. many times throughout my life and never had any problem. Now I am 53 years old. So can you explain why this is suddenly happening to me?”

Four hours after he was first taken into secondary inspection, an agent broke the news to Toghraei: He had been deemed inadmissible to the United States. His temporary national visa, which had been approved seven months earlier, was stamped over: “CANCELLED.” Toghraei received no further information and, soon after, he was told to leave.

His short trip back to Canada to see his family ended with Toghraei banned from the U.S. He did not know how he would explain to his boss in Madison why he would not be returning to work, nor what he would do about the apartment, car, and personal belongings he had there. Toghraei had never had legal troubles in his life. In late middle age, he was being told that he was too dangerous to allow through an international border.

Toghraei walked out of the airport dazed. In the chill of the Calgary autumn, he sat down on a bench to call his wife. As he opened his phone, he began to cry. The quiet waste management engineer had no idea that the moment — the ban from the U.S., caused by the IRGC terror listing — was only the first chapter in the near-total unraveling of his life.

Moe Toghraei shows his canceled American visa at his home in Edmonton, Alberta, on April 4, 2022.

Photo: Amber Bracken for The Intercept

Toghraei is just one of many Iranian dual nationals of Western countries who have been detained, interrogated, or denied entry from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom in the two years since the Trump administration designated the IRGC as a terrorist group. Over two dozen individuals with Western passports who did mandatory military service in the IRGC at some time in their life told The Intercept about experiences like Toghraei’s at international ports of entry. The men — as conscripts, they are all men — are mostly Iranian Canadian, but some hailed from other places, including Australia and European Union countries.

The problems described by the Canadian former conscripts began after the Trump administration designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In announcing the move, President Donald Trump said the “IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.” Elite divisions within the IRGC conduct Iran’s clandestine foreign policy, including carrying out proxy wars and supporting nonstate actors that have targeted civilians. It was the first time, Trump said, that the U.S. had designated part of a foreign government as a terror group.

Many, like Toghraei, disclosed their IRGC service during their immigration to the West and now find themselves retroactively placed under suspicion. Many of them suspect that, owing to the designation, they have been placed on a U.S. terrorism watchlist: a process so opaque that even confirming whether one is on the list can be impossible. As non-U.S. citizens, they have little recourse to challenge their place in such a database.

The Trump administration’s designation of the Revolutionary Guards was considered highly controversial, even among critics of the Iranian government. Most rank-and-file recruits to the IRGC serve as those in other branches of the Iranian military do: without a choice. Failure to report for conscription is considered illegal, and without completing their mandatory service, Iranians cannot claim passports or even open bank accounts.

The IRGC’s designation recently became a flashpoint in U.S. negotiations with Iran aimed at reviving the Obama-era nuclear deal. While the Iranians have pushed for the Revolutionary Guards to be delisted as part of any revived agreement, the Biden administration has reportedly hesitated to take this step — potentially out of concern over how the issue will be portrayed by their domestic political opponents in future elections.

Over the past several weeks, the back and forth on the IRGC listing became public. During an appearance in Qatar last week, Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy for Iran, who suggested no nuclear accord was imminent, said that, regardless of whether a deal was struck, sanctions on the IRGC would remain in place. The Iranians, meanwhile, have sent mixed signals on the matter. Officials have occasionally hinted that they might be willing to accept the IRGC’s terrorist designation as fait accompli before returning to strongly insisting that it be delisted before any deal is signed.

Earlier this month, in an apparent reference to the IRGC listing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested that the designation was outside the scope of current talks. “Iran has raised a number of issues that has nothing to do with the mutual compliance under the nuclear deal,” she said. “So, we would encourage Iran to focus on the deal negotiated in Vienna” — where the original nuclear agreement was struck — “rather than seeking to open issues outside the Vienna context.”

As likely intended by the Trump administration, the IRGC’s terrorist listing could well become a poison pill for pursuing any form of diplomacy with Iran.

“Policies like this end up creating another layer of this institutional enmity aimed at making sure that the U.S. and Iran never come to terms,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in reference to the Trump-era terror listing. “It inherently creates problems when you’re designating the entire army of another state as a terrorist organization, when that state also has conscription. Ultimately, these expansive definitions of terrorism end up impacting folks who had no fault of their own for their situation.”

The lives of Toghraei and others affected by this policy are now captive to domestic politics in the U.S. and the hostile U.S.-Iran relationship. Toghraei himself is a Canadian citizen who has not set foot in Iran in a decade and a half. Since being arrested and tortured in Iran following a student protest in 1999, he has feared even visiting Iran. Yet his ability to live a normal life in the West has been ruined because of a policy enacted by Trump and now carried forward by Joe Biden.

“Serving as a conscript doesn’t signal anything about a person’s ideological affiliation or politics — it shouldn’t serve as a red flag.”

In many ways, he is typical of those who have made up the bulk of IRGC recruits over the years: young men who served in the organization absent ideological purposes because they were required to by Iranian law. Though some senior Iranian security officials with alleged histories of rights abuses have lived in or visited the West, experts on the IRGC say that it is common knowledge that ordinary conscripts make up the majority of its personnel.

“The IRGC is deliberately ideological at the leadership level, but it recruits its rank and file through mandatory conscription, and a large percentage of its standing force consists of these conscripts. Generally, conscripts have no say in the matter once they are assigned to the IRGC,” said Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.” “Serving as a conscript doesn’t signal anything about a person’s ideological affiliation or politics — it shouldn’t serve as a red flag. As a conscript, you don’t have a choice: You’re just obeying the laws of your country.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, its parent agency the Department of Homeland Security, the White House’s National Security Council, and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The designation has affected a raft of Canadian Iranians. One man, who did not want to speak on the record for fear of retaliation, said he was detained and interrogated by Mexican authorities at Cancun International Airport for over 12 hours without food and water before being sent back to Canada. A case of another, Farzad Alavi, was covered by the Canadian press after he was denied entry to the U.S. over his past conscription service even after his own wife was killed in the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by the Iranian military. In March, a famous Iranian singer with Canadian citizenship, Alireza Ghorbani, was slated to perform at an Iranian New Year dinner in the U.S. but was barred from entering after being interrogated about his past military service by CBP agents.

Although exact numbers are hard to come by, Ostovar and other experts say that the official figures — between 125,000 to 150,000 enlisted members of the IRGC in Iran at any given time — are “broadly correct,” while other estimates have put the number of active IRGC personnel at 190,000. Given the relatively short terms of service for most conscripted Guards, the size of the force means there are huge numbers of current and former IRGC members in Iran and living around the world, all of whom may now be treated as potential terrorists while traveling by the U.S. government and its intelligence partners.

“Conscripts serve anywhere from 18 months to two years, so every two years you’re having a new influx of tens of thousands of conscripts. Put together, you are churning out quite a lot of ex-IRGC members every decade,” said Ostovar. “Creating a dragnet targeting all these people is completely unhelpful. It’s one of the reasons why, generally speaking, we don’t list national militaries as terrorist organizations. There are just too many complicating factors.”

Moe Toghraei displays photographs showing himself as a student in Iran decades ago at his home in Edmonton, Alberta, on April 4, 2022.

Photo: Amber Bracken for The Intercept

Last July, an Iranian Canadian electrical engineer named Shora Dehkordi was detained by Mexican authorities at the airport after arriving in Cancun for a family vacation. Dehkordi was separated from his wife and children and taken into an interrogation room where he was asked about his past military service, photographed, and given a form to fill out which included questions about his nationality and religion. Like Toghraei, he was a Canadian citizen who had been conscripted into the IRGC years ago as a young man. Dehkordi’s service had ended over a decade ago.

As his family, who were allowed to clear customs, waited for him at the baggage claim area, Dehkordi spent what felt like an eternity fielding questions from Mexican border agents. “After hours of waiting with no explanation, someone came in and told me, ‘Sorry, we cannot let you in.’ They said that this decision comes from higher authorities and there is nothing they can do,” Dehkordi said. “They didn’t even let me see my wife and kids outside. I called them on my cellphone and told them that they should continue on the trip without me.”

Dehkordi said the Mexican officials told him simply that his passport had been “flagged” and that he should take up the matter with his government. He was put on a flight back to Canada that took him to an entirely different part of the country than where he lives.

Shora Dehkordi and his family pose under the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, on a trip in the summer of 2021 after he was unable to accompany his family to Cancun, Mexico.

Photo: Courtesy of Shora Dehkordi

A consultant for a multinational firm with offices in the U.S., Dehkordi’s job requires him to make frequent trips to the U.S. Although he has earned a temporary reprieve due to a slowdown on travel due to the pandemic, he fears that in future he may lose his job if his inability to move freely persists.

“I’ve been living in Canada for almost 10 years. I’ve been law-abiding. I pay my taxes. I work like any other person. This is me. I have no association with the IRGC or any military organization in Iran,” Dehkordi said. “I have young kids, and they are afraid that every time we go as a family to the airport, we are going to be detained. I left Iran because I couldn’t really tolerate the situation there with no freedom of speech, no personal freedoms. Now it feels like I have no place in my old country and no place in my new country because of this situation.”

The Intercept interviewed others who had similar experiences at borders in North America and in European countries, many of whom did not want to speak on record for fear of retaliation. Some were detained and questioned at border checkpoints but ultimately allowed to pass, while others were barred from entry and immediately deported. Hundreds of former Iranian conscripts have shared similar stories in WhatsApp and Telegram chat groups reviewed by The Intercept. The proscription has affected U.S. relatives of former conscripts, who have been separated from their spouses and other family members as a result of the Trump administration’s designation and the attendant inability of their spouses to get immigration papers or travel to the U.S.

Many of those who spoke to The Intercept described U.S. border agents asking them about their military service specifically using the Persian-language terms Artesh and Sepah to refer to the regular military and the IRGC, respectively. One former IRGC conscript, in response to questions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about his religion, even produced documents showing that he was Jewish, something that he had concealed in Iran during his service. The individual, who was a Canadian citizen traveling across the U.S.-Canada border and asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation, was denied entry by an agent who, he said, told him that “our countries are at war.”

“It feels like I have no place in my old country and no place in my new country.”

The problems faced by former conscripts seem set to get worse. The British parliament recently debated the possibility of following the United States’s lead in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, with parliamentarians stating that the matter is “under review.” Hawkish special interest groups in Canada and Europe have also pushed for further designations. The possibility of more countries around the world listing the IRGC as a terrorist organization has former conscripts fearing a future in which they are unable to travel or subject to worse restrictions at home: treated as terrorists in the West at large and in their own adopted countries.

“We are all reading the news and feeling completely helpless,” said Ali M., an Iranian Canadian software engineer in his mid-40s who was banned from entering the U.S. last year and also did not want to use his full name for fear of retaliation. “If other countries follow the U.S. and take this step, it’s only going to become a bigger problem in our lives. We need the U.S. to know that regardless of their problem with the Iranian government, we had no choice in this matter of being conscripted.”

Like others who spoke with The Intercept, Ali is an educated professional who frequently works with U.S. companies. His job is in IT, or information technology, and requires him to travel to the U.S. to meet clients and work on projects, something which he has done hundreds of times over the past five years. Deprived of his freedom to travel, with no accusations of any wrongdoing against him that he could even contest, Ali might lose his ability to even earn a livelihood for his family.

“We’re ordinary people, man. I did my mandatory service in Iran because that was the law there, and I never hid my conscription when I immigrated to Canada because I’ve always followed the law here as well. We came here because we were seeking a better life,” he said. “I don’t know what is going to happen down the road anymore, who is going to pay my mortgage and pay the expenses for my kids. The authorities should at least give us a chance to prove ourselves, to prove that we are not any danger, but nobody listens.”

Protesters hold up a painting of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani following his assassination by U.S. airstrike in Iraq, in Tehran, Iran, on Jan. 3, 2020.

Photo: Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Due to its secretive nature, it is not possible to confirm whether foreign citizens are on the U.S. government terrorism watchlist or no-fly list. Several civil liberties experts who spoke with The Intercept said that the experiences of Iranian dual nationals of Western countries being detained at border crossings is consistent with being watchlisted. The size and scope of the list is unclear, but past reporting by The Intercept as well as documents disclosed during lawsuits have pegged its size at over 1.2 million people. Information from the watchlist is also shared with foreign countries, which has led in the past to U.S. citizens being detained while traveling abroad.

“The extent to which U.S. watchlists are garbage-in, garbage-out is shocking and the consequences of watchlisting no less so,” said Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York School of Law professor and founder of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project, or CLEAR. “What compounds the problem is that shoddy watchlist information is often shared with foreign governments, with drastic repercussions for those concerned when they arrive in countries where the authorities torture and disappear people with even less restraint than the United States.”

Kassem, who has litigated watchlisting cases with CLEAR, noted that designating the IRGC as a terror group was bound to have profound consequences for large numbers of people.

“It is taking a contemporary, highly politicized terrorism designation and applying it without limitation to hundreds of thousands of people who had no real choice in their situation.”

“When the United States designates a large branch of a foreign military, like the IRGC, in a country that has mandatory conscription for men, like Iran, the fallout is immense,” he said. “It is taking a contemporary, highly politicized terrorism designation and applying it without limitation to hundreds of thousands of people who had no real choice in their situation, most of whom are not currently nor even recently affiliated with the designated group.”

The former IRGC conscripts are not the only people of Iranian origin who have fallen victim to geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and Iran at the border. Following the U.S. government’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, reports emerged of hundreds of travelers of Iranian origin, including American citizens, being detained by border officials. In one case, a Canadian truck driver even reported being denied entry to the U.S. due to his last name.

Experts on watchlisting say that the consequences of treating all former IRGC conscripts as possible terrorists threaten to systematize this type of harassment far more broadly.

“There are tens of thousands of Iranian Canadian men alone who have done conscription service in the Iranian military and are potentially affected by these watchlisting policies. This affects a lot of people; it isn’t just a few cases,” said Tim McSorley, the national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a civil rights organization based in Canada that has consulted with Iranian Canadians. “When you are traveling with your family to a foreign country where you do not have access to legal protections and find yourself detained, it’s a terrifying experience. That is something people shouldn’t have to go through — absent real, credible evidence that they pose a security threat, and not simply because they were forced to serve in a foreign army at some point in their life.”

McSorley said that placement on the U.S. watchlist can affect individuals’ ability to travel anywhere in the world, as the flight manifest of any aircraft that crosses U.S. airspace is subject to vetting. In other instances of watchlisting, U.S. intelligence information including individuals’ watchlist status have reportedly been shared with foreign governments — sometimes authoritarian ones. Such information sharing likely gave rise to the former IRGC conscripts’ problems traveling to Mexico and other countries that inquired about their military service.

“There are many people who fled Iran because they had disagreements with the government there, though they still had to serve in the military like anyone else. Now these same people have Western citizenship and are facing detentions, interrogations, travel bans and other possible restrictions on their freedom while being treated as suspected terrorists,” said McSorley. “This is another consequence of very broad antiterrorism laws and watchlisting practices that on paper are meant to serve security purposes but simply end up damaging the lives of people who pose no threat.”

As Moe Toghraei sat outside Calgary International Airport dialing his wife at home to tell her that he had been barred from the United States, he did not yet realize how drastically his life was about to change. Shortly after informing his manager that he was not able to return to work, Toghraei was let go from his job in Wisconsin. The resulting financial pressure from his unemployment contributed to the disintegration of his nearly 30-year marriage.

“I lost everything because of this. Two months after I was let go from my job, my wife asked for divorce, because of the stress she said this had brought into our lives and because I was unable to provide,” Toghraei told me at a Tim Hortons coffee shop in Edmonton, Alberta, where he is now living with a friend. “I lost a lot because of the way that I was treated. It was not just money lost and the impact on my family but emotional problems and psychological problems that I suffered.”

“I lost everything because of this. Two months after I was let go from my job, my wife asked for divorce.”

Toghraei continues publishing books about wastewater management and recently got consulting work in Canada. He spends an increasing amount of his time connecting with other former Iranian conscripts living in the West. They share information about their experiences, which Toghraei and others pass to local officials and civil liberties groups to spur some change in their situation. The former conscripts have also found a measure of moral support in their connections; many of them are depressed or fearful about their futures. Those that Toghraei speaks to are nervous about ending up like him, particularly if more countries follow the United States’s lead in designating the IRGC as a terror group.

Toghraei himself feels trapped between two worlds. He immigrated from Iran decades ago and built a happy and successful life in Canada with a family and career. Now, he is a hostage to U.S. policy toward the country of his birth — a place that he doesn’t even feel safe to visit. While other former conscripts are closely watching the outcome of the ongoing Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, where the issue of the IRGC’s listing remains still on the agenda, Toghraei has lost hope that his predicament will be solved.

“I am now in a situation where both the U.S. hates me and Iran hates me. I’m on this blacklist that I can’t control. I don’t know what my situation will be tomorrow in Canada, let alone if I can travel abroad to Europe or Mexico,” Toghraei said, in between slow sips of coffee. “High-ranking officials from the Iranian government travel freely to America to negotiate without problems, but I’m just a little person so they feel they can just destroy my life with their policy. I think it is very shameful for the U.S. government that they treated me this way.”

“I’m not looking to push anyone over this or to cause any problems,” Toghraei said. “I just want people to know what they did to me.”

The post Conscription Into Revolutionary Guards Haunts Iranian Dual Nationals Decades Later appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
March 26, 2022

Not One Bloc or the Other: Ukraine War Shows Emerging Post-American World

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, addresses the U.N. General Assembly on March 23, 2022, in New York.

Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In the late 1990s, at a time when U.S. global dominance still looked invincible, Singaporean diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani raised questions about whether a rising Asia might thwart American hegemony in the near future.

The crux of Mahbubani’s argument — laid out in his provocatively titled 1998 book, “Can Asians Think?” — was that Western elites, then flush with their victory in the Cold War, had become overly comfortable with dictating the bounds of legitimate debate and sound policy to the rest of the world. That imperious relationship, which had existed since the colonial period, was about to come to an end, said Mahbubani. Asians and other non-Westerners had their own ideas about how the world should be run and would soon have the strength to implement them.

A few decades later, the war in Ukraine is revealing how right Mahbubani was. Despite the browbeating of U.S. politicians to take a side in the conflict, a growing number of Asian, African, and Latin American countries have charted a neutral path. China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, and even Mexico have remained aloof, resisting calls to diplomatically isolate Russia or join the campaign to sanction its economy. Asian companies have remained in Russia even as their Western counterparts have departed en masse. At the United Nations, meanwhile, a bevy of African states, largest among them South Africa, have abstained from resolutions aimed at ostracizing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the invasion.

The neutral stance of these countries has evidently come as a shock to many Western elites, long accustomed to instructing other nations on what geopolitical positions they must take.

The way the West corralled support as the only superpower during and after the Cold War, in other words, is no longer effective.

India offers the best example of just how much this posture of self-interested neutrality has caught U.S. elites unawares. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an exemplar of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, denounced India for its neutral stance. Haass, apparently unaware of his patronizing tone, said that India’s refusal to side against Russia proved that the country of 1.2 billion people “remains unprepared to step up to major power responsibilities or be a dependable partner.” President Joe Biden similarly criticized India for being “shaky” in its response to Russia, compared with European Union countries and Japan, which have rallied to the Ukrainian cause.

American leaders have long hoped that India would be willing to serve as a partner in helping the U.S. contain China and uphold the U.S.-backed liberal order. As it turns out, India has its own interests to pursue. It is a major customer of Russian arms and energy, enjoying a long relationship with Moscow going back to the Cold War. Morality aside, there are concrete, material reasons that Indians would not want to sacrifice these ties simply to win praise in Washington.

India is far from the only country that has remained studiously neutral over Ukraine. In a development that visibly irritated U.S. diplomats, a large number of African countries are also choosing to stand on the sidelines. Following a U.N. vote condemning Russia for its invasion from which 17 African nations chose to abstain, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield criticized the countries for their alleged failure to understand the gravity of the situation, paying no mind to their own commercial or security ties with Russia and practically demanding that they take a stance that follows the American position:

I think what I make of it is that we have to do additional work to help these countries to understand the impact of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, and I think that we have done some of that work already in terms of engaging with those countries. I think many of them saw an abstention as being neutral, and there is no neutral ground here. There is no question. … You cannot stand on the sidelines and watch the aggression that we see taking place in Ukraine and say you’re going to be neutral about it.

Like India, African nations of course have their own interests in the conflict separate from those of the United States. Many of them have good relations with Russia and have built critical economic and political ties with Putin’s government. Russia is a major provider of raw materials like wheat and also enjoys genuine popularity as an alternative to the West for investment and security support. While many Western countries pledged to take in Ukrainian refugees over the past month, Africans living in Europe have suffered racism at border crossings while trying to flee the conflict themselves — something that has become a major issue of concern for many Africans, including diplomats, but was ignored by Thomas-Greenfield in her comments calling on the African nations to get in line.

In an article criticizing the U.S. ambassador’s remarks, Africa scholar Ebenezer Obadare pointed out that Thomas-Greenfield had treated Africans as effectively “moral adolescents who require Western supervision in order to understand and do what is right,” demanding their support for the U.S. position on Ukraine while failing to account for their own interests or perspectives. There is still time for U.S. officials to try a new approach, Obadare said. It is unclear, though, whether diplomats from a superpower accustomed to having its way around the world are capable of a more nuanced approach.

The irony of an independent, nonaligned world order emerging at this precise moment to buck the U.S. is that the American position on the war in Ukraine is built on a strong moral case. U.S. leaders are right to criticize Russia for a brutal, unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country. The use of naked force to coerce a democracy into sacrificing its independence is a dangerous development that there is legitimate reason to condemn. Yet after decades of aggression and abuses of its own, much of the world seems to have concluded that U.S. credibility has run dry on such matters.

Rather than lining up with one or another bloc, as they were forced to in the Cold War, we are instead seeing the emergence of a genuinely post-American world. Many of the countries now thumbing their nose at the U.S., including aspiring great powers like India and China, are guilty of their own grave human rights abuses. Yet it is unlikely that they will ever return to their prior roles as supplicants or followers of the West.

Years ago, Mahbubani, the Singaporean diplomat and author, already saw the shape of this world that is now clearly coming into view. Through a mixture of error and inevitability, the West was going into decline, and many of the values it had brought into existence would decline along with it.

For better or worse, whatever comes next will be a clean break from the past several centuries of Western hegemony, not just in politics but in culture and ideas as well.

“Western values do not form a seamless web. Some are good. Some are bad,” Mahbubani wrote. “But one has to stand outside the West to see this clearly, and to see how the West’s relative decline is being brought about by its own hand.”

The post Not One Bloc or the Other: Ukraine War Shows Emerging Post-American World appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
March 20, 2022

What Biden Got Right About Arming Ukraine — and Wrong About Sanctioning Russia

A soldier stands guard outside a damaged residential building in the Pozniaky neighborhood of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 17, 2022.

Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

On Wednesday, the U.S. announced a flood of new weaponry into Ukraine, including advanced anti-aircraft weaponry and small arms aimed at helping the Ukrainian government repel Russia’s invasion. The weapons will almost certainly kill more Russian service members in Ukraine, adding to the thousands who are already believed to have died in the past few weeks. The arms may also, paradoxically, serve a more humanitarian purpose: helping bring the conflict to a stalemate and putting the Ukrainian government in a stronger position to negotiate an end to the war.

Ending the war by such a negotiated outcome could also serve to reduce civilian harm in a perhaps less expected way: providing an opportunity to end the economic warfare that is already doing damage to millions of innocent Russians.

The United States and its allies have waged the economic total war against Russia since the start of the invasion, quickly making Russia the most heavily sanctioned country on Earth. This economic offensive is already inflicting harm on everyday Russians, including those opposed to Vladimir Putin’s government. Yet as effective as these sanctions are at driving Russians into poverty, it’s uncertain whether they will affect the course of the war in Ukraine. Undeterred, the Russian military is still bombarding Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol with artillery and airstrikes on a nightly basis.

Paired with diplomatic pressure, military aid that helps the conflict reach a stalemate could end the war sooner by making it nearly impossible for the Russian military, which is already showing signs of exhaustion, to take major urban centers and win a decisive victory. With military victory off the table, negotiations could bring a meaningful end to the war, prevent a nightmare scenario of occupation and insurgency, and — crucially, for humanitarian purposes — allow many Russia sanctions to be lifted in exchange for concessions to Ukrainian sovereignty.

There are reasons for the international community to support taking a hard line in defense of Ukraine, including by providing them weaponry. What is at stake is not just one country’s sovereignty but the already-besieged post-World War II principle that large countries cannot simply devour their neighbors or reshape their borders through armed force. The final death of that principle on the streets of Ukrainian cities will make the world a more violent place than even what we see today. It will mean a regrowth of the violent jungle that characterized Europe during the period of the world wars — but spread over the entire planet.

The current, punitive approach of targeting ordinary Russians through economic warfare is likely to be both harmful and ineffective. Tailored sanctions against oligarchs and Russian officials involved in human rights abuses during the current war are warranted, but even the harshest such economic measures will not be enough to stop a regime that has already put its political credibility at stake in conquering Ukraine. Responding to Putin’s military aggression by denying ordinary Russians access to their life savings is a cruel non sequitur that does little to help Ukrainians.

The oft-unspoken aim of the present approach of trying to immiserate Russian society is that it will stoke so much discontent that it results in regime change. Yet the Russian masses have little say over their government or their leaders, who are glad to repress any serious dissent, so fomenting bottom-up revolutionary change seems extremely unlikely. Past sanctions campaigns against countries like Iraq and Iran have never resulted in such regime collapse. Even the Cuban government is still in power after decades under economic embargo.

Instead of toppling governments, there is even reason to believe that sanctions like those now being implemented on Russia can help solidify authoritarian leaders’ hold on power: forcing their middle classes to focus more on survival than political change, while regime-connected elites hoard resources and become gatekeepers to what remains of the economy. Some leaders of sanctioned countries have even turned sanctions into a means of ideological legitimization, portraying themselves as nationalist defenders against hostile foreign powers’ economic warfare.

Then there are the calls for a more robust, direct intervention against Russia. These ideas are nonstarters. The breathless calls for a NATO-backed no-fly zone fail to acknowledge that the policy would constitute an act of war, requiring direct targeting of Russian military assets. There is also the small but real possibility of nuclear escalation, a disaster that Cold War-era military officials avoided only with great care.

A significant boost to Ukrainian firepower might allow President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government to reach terms with Putin, spurring a negotiated end to the war short of surrender. Instead, the current balance could see something like what happened in Syria, where foreign powers provided enough weaponry to the opposition to keep it fighting but not enough to win or force a permanent stalemate. The result in Syria was that much of the country was destroyed over the course of a decade, while the Assad regime remained in power.

The current balance could see something like what happened in Syria, where foreign powers provided enough weaponry to the opposition to keep it fighting but not enough to win.

Letting the Ukrainian government fall while arming a long-term insurgency against Russian control — or even a lengthy, debilitating siege where the Ukrainians hang on, but only in pockets — could make the country permanently unstable, killing Russian conscripts and ordinary Ukrainians in huge numbers while failing to bring a return to peace. Ukraine would truly become a European version of Syria — or even Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets: the social fabric destroyed beyond repair and an incubator for far-right terrorist groups established in the wreckage.

Such an outcome would be a disaster for everyone. Putin would enrage the West by deposing or killing Zelenskyy, a liberal political leader now widely viewed as a hero for his role during the crisis, and imposing a puppet in his place. The misery of de facto occupation and insurgency in Ukraine would be accompanied by the misery that a broad sanctions regime imposed on Russians for years to come.

People visit a local bank branch with a screen showing the currency exchange rates of U.S. Dollar and Euro to Russian Ruble, on March 9, 2022 in Moscow, Russia.

Photo: Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty Images

During the Cold War, Russia and the United States fought proxy battles all over the world that did not result in conventional war between the big powers, let alone nuclear escalation. Maintaining deconfliction hotlines and avoiding scenarios that lead to NATO and Russian troops shooting at each other directly are critically important. There is no scenario that significantly raises the risk of nuclear conflict that can be tolerated, but that doesn’t mean NATO countries are constrained from giving more serious help to Ukrainians.

It scarcely needs saying, but there are no good options today in Ukraine. Sending more arms to a country at war seems like a paradoxical way of lessening harm to innocent people. Raising our eyes beyond the short-term, however, there are reasonable grounds to believe that such a policy of bolstering the legitimate Ukrainian government could spare the lives of more people than letting the country collapse into Putin’s hands — or dooming 140 million Russian civilians to life under permanent economic siege.

A continued flow of arms is a logical step given the brutal reality of Russia’s continued attacks across Ukraine. Averting disaster may now depend on whether the Western countries can prevent the fall of Kyiv in the weeks to come. Simply put, sustainable peace in Europe will not happen without a strengthened Ukraine. There is still time to save the continent from returning to the savagery that it experienced in the 20th century. That time, however, is running out — and quickly.

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February 27, 2022

Lesson From Ukraine: Breaking Promises to Small Countries Means They’ll Never Give Up Nukes

An engineer examines the engine of an SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile in Dnipro, Ukraine, on July 26, 1996.

Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Ukraine was once home to thousands of nuclear weapons. The weapons were stationed there by the Soviet Union and inherited by Ukraine when, at the end of the Cold War, it became independent. It was the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. During an optimistic moment in the early 1990s, Ukraine’s leadership made what today seems like a fateful decision: to disarm the country and abandon those terrifying weapons, in exchange for signed guarantees from the international community ensuring its future security.

The decision to disarm was portrayed at the time as a means of ensuring Ukraine’s security through agreements with the international community — which was exerting pressure over the issue — rather than through the more economically and politically costly path of maintaining its own nuclear program. Today, with Ukraine being swarmed by heavily armed invading Russian troops bristling with weaponry and little prospect of defense from its erstwhile friends abroad, that decision is looking like a bad one.

Nations that sacrifice their nuclear deterrents in exchange for promises of goodwill are often signing their own death warrants.

The tragedy now unfolding in Ukraine is underlining a broader principle clearly seen around the world: Nations that sacrifice their nuclear deterrents in exchange for promises of international goodwill are often signing their own death warrants. In a world bristling with weapons with the potential to end human civilization, nonproliferation itself is a morally worthwhile and even necessary goal. But the experience of countries that actually have disarmed is likely to lead more of them to conclude otherwise in future.

The betrayal of Ukrainians in particular cannot be understated. In 1994, the Ukrainian government signed a memorandum that brought its country into the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while formally relinquishing its status as a nuclear state. The text of that agreement stated that in exchange for the step, the “Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s territorial integrity has not been much respected since. After the 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea by Russia — which brought no serious international response — Ukrainian leaders had already begun to think twice about the virtues of the agreement they had signed just two decades earlier. Today they sound positively bitter about it.

“We gave away the capability for nothing,” Andriy Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister of Ukraine, said this month about his nation’s former nuclear weapons. “Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”

Ukrainians are not the only ones who have come to regret signing away their nuclear weapons. In 2003, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi made a surprise announcement that his nation would abandon its nuclear program and chemical weapons in exchange for normalization with the West.

“Libya stands as one of the few countries to have voluntarily abandoned its WMD programs,” wrote Judith Miller a few years later in an article about the decision headlined “Gadhafi’s Leap of Faith.” Miller, then just out of the New York Times, added that the White House had opted “to make Libya a true model for the region” by helping encourage other states with nuclear programs to follow Gaddafi’s example.

Libya kept moving forward. It signed on to an additional protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency allowing for extensive international monitoring of nuclear reserves. In return, sanctions against the country were lifted and relations between Washington and Tripoli, severed during the Cold War, were reestablished. Gaddafi and his family spent a few years building ties with Western elites, and all seemed to be going well for the Libyan dictator.

Then came the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Gaddafi found that the same world leaders who had ostensibly become his economic partners and diplomatic allies were suddenly providing decisive military aid to his opposition — even cheering on his own death.

Promises, betrayals, aggression: It’s a pattern that extends even to countries that have merely considered foreclosing their avenues to a nuclear deterrent.

Missile silos abandoned by the Gaddafi regime are left in the desert at a military base in Lona, Libya, on Sept. 29, 2011.

Photo: John Cantlie/Getty Images

Take Iran: In 2015, the Islamic Republic signed a comprehensive nuclear deal with the U.S. that limited its possible breakout capacity toward building a nuclear weapon and provided extensive monitoring of its civilian nuclear program. Not long afterward, the agreement was violated by the Trump administration, despite the country’s own continued compliance. Since 2016, when Trump left the deal, Iran has been hit with crushing international sanctions that have devastated its economy and been subjected to a campaign of assassination targeting its senior military leadership.

To date, no nuclear-armed state has ever faced a full-scale invasion by a foreign power, regardless of its own actions.

The nuclear deal was characterized at the time as the first step toward a broader set of talks over regional disputes between Iranian and U.S. leaders, who had been alienated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Instead, the deal marked another bitter chapter in the long-troubled relationship between the two countries.

To date, no nuclear-armed state has ever faced a full-scale invasion by a foreign power, regardless of its own actions. North Korea has managed to keep its hermetic political system intact for decades despite tensions with the international community. North Korean officials have even cited the example of Libya in discussing their own weapons. In 2011, as bombs rained down on Gaddafi’s government, a North Korean foreign ministry official said, “The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson.” That official went on to refer to giving up weapons in signed agreements as “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”

Perhaps the starkest contrast to the treatment of Ukraine, Libya, and Iran, however, is Pakistan, which developed nuclear weapons decades ago in defiance of the United States. Despite being criticized at the time for contributing to nuclear proliferation and facing periodic sanctions, Pakistan has managed to insulate itself from attack or even serious ostracism by the U.S. despite several flagrant provocations in the decades since. Today Pakistan even remains a security partner of the U.S., having received billions of dollars of military aid over the past several decades.

Given the mortal hazards that nuclear weapons pose to life on Earth, nonproliferation remains a worthwhile collective goal. Humanity will not benefit from a renewal of the nuclear arms race, and the ideals behind a U.S.-backed rules-based liberal order are morally attractive. A world in which they were truly applied would probably be a fairer and more peaceful one than what has existed in the past, yet we must also recognize that the liberal order can and will fail. That lesson is especially true for small nations outmatched by great powers.

Given the tragedy we are witnessing in Ukraine today — where, despite its past assurances, the international community has remained a passive observer — leaders of small countries must be forgiven for thinking twice before sacrificing their deterrent, regardless of what the leaders of great powers already armed with nuclear weaponry may say.

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February 24, 2022

Como o projeto de Putin para a Ucrânia reflete a ‘nostalgia perigosa’ de um império perdido

Um soldado armado se posiciona na fronteira da Rússia com a Ucrânia na região de Kharkiv, noroeste ucraniano, em 16 de fevereiro de 2022.

Foto: Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Com a Europa à beira de uma sombria batalha por terras em uma escala não vista desde a Segunda Guerra, foi Martin Kimani, embaixador do Quênia que entregou a mensagem mais próxima do verdadeiro motivo da crise durante uma reunião nas Nações Unidas: uma nostalgia persistente por impérios.

Em uma reunião de emergência do Conselho de Segurança da ONU, convocada para discutir o ataque russo contra a Ucrânia, Kimani não só condenou a ameaça à soberania ucraniana criada pelo governo de Vladimir Putin. Ele foi além: destacou como a obsessão incessante por territórios e fronteiras continua gerando cenários de violência pelo mundo, muitas décadas após o desaparecimento das linhas desenhadas pelos impérios europeus. Kimani propôs uma visão alternativa de paz por meio da aceitação das fronteiras criadas após o colapso dos impérios no século 20 e pediu uma integração econômica e cultural.

“O Quênia e quase todos os outros países africanos nasceram após o fim dos impérios”, disse Kimani. “Nossas fronteiras não foram desenhadas por nós. Elas foram desenhadas nas distantes metrópoles coloniais, em Londres, Paris e Lisboa, sem considerar as nações antigas que eles mesmo racharam ao meio. Hoje, do outro lado da fronteira de cada país africano, vivem nossos compatriotas com quem compartilhamos profundos laços históricos, culturais e linguísticos. Na independência, se tivéssemos escolhido perseguir estados com base na homogeneidade étnica, racial ou religiosa, ainda estaríamos travando guerras sangrentas. Em vez disso, concordamos em nos contentar com as fronteiras que herdamos”.

O representante permanente das Nações Unidas do Quênia, Martin Kimani, fala na sede da ONU em outubro de 2021.

Foto: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

As declarações de Kimani, que viralizaram nas redes sociais e na mídia africana, também criticaram o que ele chamou de “nostalgia perigosa” por impérios que leva os países a redesenhar as fronteiras à força para se reunirem com cidadãos de outras nações com quem compartilham afinidade cultural – o exato argumento que o governo russo usou para justificar sua invasão à Ucrânia, em apoio aos “russos” que lá vivem. Em vez disso, Kimani pediu à Europa que siga as regras da carta da ONU, como os países da União Africana têm procurado fazer, respeitando a soberania dos vizinhos “não porque nossas fronteiras nos satisfazem, mas porque queremos algo maior, forjado na paz”.

O discurso de Kimani é perfeitamente calibrado para responder aos comentários de Putin nos últimos dias. Em falas públicas, Putin desdenhou da própria existência da Ucrânia como nação, descrevendo-a como um vassalo imperial que foi separado pela política moderna de seu lugar de direito sob o controle russo. Apesar de ter uma longa história independente, bem como uma língua e cultura distintas, a Ucrânia foi governada em parte por impérios concorrentes ao longo dos séculos, incluindo mais recentemente a Rússia czarista e a União Soviética.

O país conquistou sua independência total em 1991, após a dissolução da União Soviética, um evento que Putin descreve como “a maior tragédia geopolítica do século 20”. Em um discurso televisionado na segunda-feira, dia 21, em que reconheceu a independência de duas regiões separatistas da Ucrânia, Putin chamou o país de “terra historicamente russa” no decorrer de uma extensa lição de pseudo-história para justificar o envio de tropas russas à nação vizinha.

Putin não está sozinho no discurso que mantém sonhos de impérios perdidos ou na tentativa de reconstruí-los redesenhando fronteiras. Muita violência ao redor do mundo resulta de sentimentos semelhantes em outros países: as políticas externas agressivas da China, da Turquia, do Irã e da Sérvia, bem como de outros estados modernos construídos a partir das ruínas de impérios passados, costumam estar igualmente focadas em restaurar territórios históricos nos dias de hoje. Embora menos explicitamente irredentistas, alguns países da Europa Ocidental também parecem ter um sentimento de propriedade sobre os territórios que anteriormente controlavam, principalmente a França na região do Sahel na África e no Líbano.

Apesar do anúncio de sanções contra a Rússia por parte dos países da União Europeia, Putin ainda dá sinais de estar pronto para “restaurar” o controle sobre partes da Ucrânia, além das regiões separatistas de Donetsk e Luhansk. Relatos de acúmulo de tropas perto das fronteiras da Ucrânia continuam nos últimos dias, enquanto os líderes da Otan dizem que ainda estão se preparando para uma invasão em larga escala do território ucraniano. Estimativas apontam que essa guerra poderia matar dezenas de milhares de cidadãos ucranianos e desencadear uma crise de refugiados em toda a Europa.

Os Estados Unidos criticaram a Rússia por violar a soberania de outra nação. Mas dado seu próprio histórico de invasões, assassinatos e tortura de cidadãos estrangeiros, o país pode não ser o melhor mensageiro. Em vez disso, no que certamente é um momento terrível para a Europa, são as palavras do embaixador queniano que melhor incorporam os princípios do internacionalismo liberal e da cooperação multilateral que agora parecem mortalmente ameaçados.

“Acreditamos que todos os estados formados a partir de impérios que ruíram ou recuaram têm muitos povos que anseiam por integração com povos de estados vizinhos. Isso é normal e compreensível. Afinal, quem não quer unir-se a seus irmãos e estabelecer propósitos comuns? No entanto, o Quênia rejeita tal desejo de perseguição baseada em força”, disse Kimani. “Devemos completar nossa recuperação das cinzas dos impérios mortos de uma forma que não nos leve de volta a novas formas de dominação e opressão”.

Pedindo uma resolução pacífica para a crise e reiterando os direitos dos ucranianos, ele finalizou: “O multilateralismo está em seu leito de morte esta noite. Ele foi agredido como foi por outros estados poderosos no passado recente”.

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February 22, 2022

How Putin’s Designs on Ukraine Reflect the “Dangerous Nostalgia” of a Lost Empire

An armed guard stands before a fence at the Ukraine-Russia border in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine on Feb. 16, 2022.

Photo: Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

As Europe faces the grim prospect of a land war on a scale it has not seen since World War II, it was Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, who delivered a message that struck at the heart of the crisis: a lingering nostalgia for empire.

At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, called to discuss the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Kimani did not just condemn the threat to Ukrainian sovereignty by President Vladimir Putin’s government. He went further, highlighting how an unceasing obsession over territory and borders is continuing to drive violence around the world, long after the European empires that drew those demarcations have vanished from the map. He offered an alternate vision of peace through acceptance of the borders created by the collapse of empires and nations in the 20th century, calling for economic and cultural integration instead.

“Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire,” Kimani said. “Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders we inherited.”

Kenyan United Nations Permanent Representative Martin Kimani speaks at U.N. headquarters in October 2021.

Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Kimani’s remarks, which went viral on social media and in the African media, also criticized what he called the “dangerous nostalgia” for empire that leads countries to redraw borders by force to reunite with citizens of other nations with whom they share cultural affinity — the exact argument the Russian government has used to justify its invasion of Ukraine in support of Russian speakers there. Instead, Kimani called on Europe to follow the rules of the U.N. charter as the African Union countries have sought to do, respecting the sovereignty of neighboring countries “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater forged in peace.”

Kimani’s speech seemed perfectly calibrated to respond to Putin’s remarks in recent days. In public statements, Putin has denigrated the very existence of Ukraine as a nation by describing it as little more than an imperial vassal that had been severed by modern politics from its rightful place under Russian control. Despite having a long independent history as well as a distinct language and culture, Ukraine has been governed in part by competing empires over the centuries, including most recently by Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. The country gained its full independence in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, an event Putin has described as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” In a televised address on Monday in which he recognized the independence of two breakaway regions of Ukraine, Putin called Ukraine “historically Russian land” in the course of an extended pseudo-history lesson given to justify his deployment of Russian troops.

Putin is not alone in harboring dreams of lost empire or in trying to rebuild them by redrawing new borders in the present day. Much violence around the world seems to stem from similar sentiments held in other countries: The aggressive foreign policies of China, Turkey, Iran, and Serbia, as well as other modern states built from the ruins of past empires, appear to be similarly fixated on restoring historic territories to which they feel they have been deprived in the present day. Though less explicitly irredentist at the moment, some Western European countries also seem to feel a sense of ownership over territories they formerly controlled, most notably France in the Sahel region of Africa and in Lebanon.

Despite the announcement of an initial round of sanctions on Russia from European Union countries, Putin still looks ready to “restore” Russian control over parts of Ukraine beyond the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Reports of troop buildups near Ukraine’s borders have continued over the past several days, while NATO leaders have said that they are still bracing for what could be a full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory. Some estimates have said that such a war could kill tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens and trigger a refugee crisis across Europe.

The United States has criticized Russia for violating another nation’s sovereignty. But given its own track record of invasions, assassinations, and torture of foreign citizens, it may not be the best messenger. Instead, at what’s certainly a dire moment for Europe, it is the words of the Kenyan ambassador that best embody the high principles of liberal internationalism and multilateral cooperation that now seem mortally endangered.

“We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force,” Kimani said. “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

Calling for a peaceful resolution to the crisis and affirming the rights of Ukrainians, he added: “Multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. It has been assaulted as it has been by other powerful states in the recent past.”

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February 3, 2022

Killing of ISIS Leader Shows That U.S. Forever Wars Will Never End

President Joe Biden exits after announcing the killing of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 3, 2022.

Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In a national address delivered this morning, President Joe Biden performed what has now become a familiar ritual for U.S. politicians: announcing the death of a terrorist leader. The latest enemy figure whose death has been presented to Americans as a victory was the head of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, who was reportedly killed alongside his family during a U.S. special forces raid in northern Syria last night. In brief remarks, Biden characterized the raid as a victory that had made the world more secure, and without cost to Americans.

“Last night at my direction, U.S. military forces in northwest Syria successfully undertook a counterterrorism operation to protect the American people and our Allies, and make the world a safer place,” Biden said in a statement early Thursday morning. “Thanks to the skill and bravery of our Armed Forces, we have taken off the battlefield Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi—the leader of ISIS. All Americans have returned safely from the operation.”

The raid on a home where al-Quraishi was staying killed a total of 13 people, including a number of women and children. Images on social media of mangled corpses immediately began circulating in the aftermath, broadcast from the scene by local journalists. The attack came after weeks of violence in northern Syria, where ISIS fighters staged an uprising against members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that killed hundreds. Initial claims by Biden and other U.S. officials have suggested that the civilians killed in the raid on al-Quraishi’s house died when the ISIS leader chose to detonate his own suicide vest rather than be captured by U.S. forces. Syrian journalists also shared images online of wreckage from a crashed U.S. helicopter, though U.S. officials have echoed Biden’s statement that no Americans were harmed in the operation.

Although al-Quraishi, alongside his family, does appear to be dead, Biden’s claim in his public address that the world has been made safer by the killing of yet another terrorist leader is hard to credit. Since the outset of the Global War on Terrorism over two decades ago, the periodic killings of commanders from groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda, al-Shabab, and, most recently, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have been touted as significant victories and even turning points in America’s so-called war on terror. Despite these repeated tactical victories, from which U.S. presidents have extracted much political capital over the years, the underlying wars themselves have continued and even worsened.

An article in the national security publication War on the Rocks last year highlighted the limits of killing terrorist leaders as a means of strategic victory. “Too often, leadership decapitation is viewed as a panacea, as policymakers tout the removal of high-value targets to suggest a ‘turning point’ that fails to materialize,” noted Colin Clarke, the director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. “It is correct to seek to decapitate terrorist organizations, but these are tactical actions, not strategic ones.”

Not much is known about al-Quraishi in comparison with his more notorious predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. An investigation last year by the national security publication New Lines Magazine drew upon Iraqi intelligence files and interviews with individuals who had previously been incarcerated with him to paint a picture of the man who had been quietly holding the reins of ISIS over the past several years. That investigation managed to get some context about his past from personal documentation and also a photo of him while incarcerated by U.S. forces in 2008 at Camp Bucca, a military prison in Iraq. But it is unclear how much power al-Quraishi actually wielded and how important he was to an organization that has been severely diminished by years of brutal fighting. There is little reason to assume that the killing of al-Quraishi will result in anything more than a tactical reorganization of the Islamic State, or even its splintering into other, new extremist groups amid the ongoing misery and chaos of the Syrian civil war. His death is also unlikely to mean an end to the U.S. “forever wars” in the region, which have switched to a permanent mode of militarized policing in which the U.S. reserves the right to carry out bombings and assassinations at will but does not refer to these actions as “war,” even when civilians are killed in the process.

After a long list of failures and defeats, the U.S. public has clearly tired of its conflicts in the Middle East. But despite rhetoric from American leaders about ending the forever wars, they look likely to continue under new definitions and with new tactics. In his remarks announcing the death of al-Quraishi, even Biden refrained from promising a forthcoming end to the conflicts or even a radically transformed security situation for Americans. Though al-Quraishi, a man whom most Americans would likely have been unable to name, is now dead, along with several civilians, the two-decade-long conflict that led to his emergence still continues — with no horizon in sight.

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January 26, 2022

UAE’s Security Bubble Is Punctured by Its Role in Yemen War

This satellite image shows the aftermath of an attack claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on an Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. fuel depot in United Arab Emirates, on Jan. 22, 2022.

Photo: Planet Labs PBC via AP

The United Arab Emirates has built an economic and political system reliant on its status as a safe harbor in an unstable region. The glittering prosperity and safety of cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi has enticed people from around the world to live, work, and invest in the small Gulf Arab country — just 150 kilometers from the coast of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The success of the Emirates has often felt like a bit of a miracle: a bubble of exorbitant wealth that has grown in the desert over a few short decades, thanks in large part to the contributions of expatriate workers and professionals. The fragility of this bubble however was highlighted this week, when the war in poverty-stricken Yemen, in which the UAE has taken a prominent role, finally arrived at its doorstep.

Two separate attacks claimed by Yemeni Houthi rebels this month struck the UAE, shattering the image of calm upon which the country’s economic model depends. The first attack, a drone strike on January 17 which hit the airport and a fuel depot in Abu Dhabi, set off explosions that killed three expatriate workers. That attack enraged Emirati leaders, who struck back by bombing a prison in the northern Yemeni city of Saada in an attack that killed dozens. The Houthis seemed undeterred by this retaliation, however, striking the Emirates again this week with a ballistic missile attack aimed at a military base outside Abu Dhabi which is home to thousands of U.S. service personnel.

Images of interceptor missiles lighting up the sky over the city went viral on social media, illustrating just how close the violence of Yemen had come to the wealthy Emirates. The second attack did not result in any casualties, but it further underlined that after several years of outside intervention, the war in Yemen is becoming more, not less, dangerous for the surrounding Gulf Arab states.

The gradual erosion of the UAE’s security bubble is attributable in large part to decisions made its crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, or MBZ, who has charted an aggressive new path for Emirati foreign policy. MBZ has taken a leading role in supporting the Gulf Arab coalition’s war in Yemen, making his nation an active belligerent in a conflict that has devastated the region’s poorest country. The UAE has also fought in recent years in Libya, helping the country earn the nickname “Little Sparta” for its attempts to confront larger powers.

Emirati leaders have traditionally been conservative about their relations with other countries in the region, cognizant of their small size and the fragile nature of their expatriate-driven economic model. Under MBZ, however, the Emirates has sought to become a major player, taking a leading role in foreign military campaigns and aligning itself closely with countries outside the region, like the U.S., to contain regional powers like Turkey and Iran. MBZ has even felt confident enough to break with the traditional Arab consensus on relations with Israel, establishing not just diplomatic contacts but cordial relations with Israeli leaders in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

So far, the UAE has been able to reap the benefits of an active foreign policy without paying any of the costs. But the missile attacks from Yemen, whose poverty and suffering are not geographically distant from the opulence of Abu Dhabi, shows there are limits to how far the Emiratis can go on their own. In comments to the New York Times following this week’s ballistic missile attack on the Al Dhafra airbase, individuals connected to the UAE government expressed genuine puzzlement and concern that their country’s involvement in the brutal war in Yemen had rebounded back on it.

“We have to be honest that this is something that we are not used to,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based political scientist, told the Times. “The U.A.E. has maintained a reputation of being a safe haven for investors, visitors and tourists.”

Abdulla expressed confidence that the attacks would not change the Emirates’ reputation as a safe place to live and invest. A sustained period of such attacks, however — should the war in Yemen further spiral out of control, or in the event of a larger conflagration between the U.S., Israel, and Iran — would put the Emirates on the firing line and could do irreversible damage to the country’s status as a safe harbor. Unlike other countries in the region with large native populations, the wealth of the UAE is almost wholly dependent on the millions of expatriates, both rich and poor, who live and work there. If the security upon which the country’s prosperity relies is disturbed, these foreigners will quickly leave for their home countries — taking their money and their skills with them.

There is still time for the UAE’s leaders to change course and return to a traditional path of regional dealmaking and compromise that has helped them preserve domestic peace. Such an approach is still exemplified by the neighboring Sultanate of Oman, which continues to act as a mediator among rivals in the Middle East. Absent that, it will be hard to keep the violence that has tormented the region from Abu Dhabi’s doorstep forever.

For all its many faults, the UAE genuinely has served as a place in the Middle East where people from many backgrounds have been able to live, work, and worship in relative peace. Protecting that political order requires thoughtful leadership as opposed to recklessness and belligerence. The missile attacks this month from Yemen show that the UAE is indeed a bubble, and a fragile one at that.

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January 18, 2022

Contra a Billionaire Bro: Why We Should Care About China’s Rights Violations in Xinjiang

Chamath Palihapitiya speaks during a television interview in San Francisco on Oct. 19, 2016.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day that should inspire reflection on the importance of universal human rights, billionaire investor and part-owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors Chamath Palihapitiya went viral with his own eyebrow-raising take on the subject.

On his podcast, Palihapitiya leapt with both feet into a debate about corporate responses to human rights violations in countries where they do business, specifically about China, where human rights advocates have documented atrocities against Uyghurs, a minority ethnic group in the Xinjiang region.

Palihapitiya said he did not care about the Uyghurs’ predicament — and that this sentiment was broadly shared by elites who were simply unwilling to be as bold as him and just say it. “Let’s be honest, nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” he told his visibly surprised co-host, Jason Calacanis, on their podcast over the weekend.

“Let’s be honest, nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?”

Palihapitiya proudly expressed his indifference at reports of rape and forced sterilization of Uyghur women. He dismissed Calacanis’s concern as moral “virtue signaling.”

“You bring it up because you really care, and I think that’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care,” Palihapitiya said. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line.”

To defend his posture of uncaring, Palihapitiya turned his sights on Western countries’ own track record of human rights abuses, including wars of aggression and torture at domestic prisons. Concerns about foreign atrocities, like the furor over China and the Uyghurs, he said, have at times even served as a cover for military interventionist policies that have done even more harm.

It’s all true, as far as it goes: The West has its atrocities, many don’t care about China’s abuses, and those who do care risk having their concerns twisted into new rights violations of their own against the same populations they expressed concern about.

However, it’s worth stating plainly what Palihapitiya is talking about: creating a formal conspiracy of silence between countries, including in the corporate world, over atrocities like those taking place in Xinjiang. Is that a responsible position, let alone an admirable one?

The biggest defense Palihapitiya might be able to mount is that at least he’s not a hypocrite: Americans commit human rights abuses, so perhaps they have no right to shame others over them.

Yet even hypocritical criticisms exchanged by superpowers can do good. Over the last century, history shows that they have.

A Uyghur family prays at the grave of a loved one at a local shrine and cemetery in the western Xinjiang province, China, on Sept. 12, 2016.

Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in serious ideological and public relations campaigns to shame each other over human rights abuses. In both cases, there were rewards to be reaped by ordinary people through the shaming.

The need to respond to Communist criticism of the treatment of Black Americans helped give more political heft to the fight to end Jim Crow laws — if for no other reason than that the racist system provided strong talking points to the U.S.’s Soviet rivals.

“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,” historian Mary Dudziak has said. President Harry Truman argued that civil rights would help the U.S. win global support during the Cold War and, accordingly, integrated the military.

Moving the other way, American pressure over the Soviet Union’s attacks on individual freedoms were also eventually felt in the Kremlin, where Soviet leaders, realizing global public opinion wouldn’t give domestic repression a pass, eventually had to defend themselves. Five years after the U.S. passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment, for instance, the Soviet Union had eased up restrictions on the emigration of Jews such that numbers began to hit record highs; the issue was far from resolved, but continuing progress was widely attributed to the U.S.’s public stances.

In that sense, the Cold War competition arguably had a positive side effect, even if it was a marginal one. Both superpowers were forced to compete at least in part on their human rights records. This was not because of any Damascene moral conversation by either government but because of the urgent need to dull the sting of their enemies’ criticism. Even if this shaming saved only a few people from lynching or the Gulag, it made a difference.

When it comes to the rivalry between the U.S. and China, Palihapitiya suggested embracing the “hard, ugly truth” that it is a frivolous “luxury belief” to say anything about human rights. Doing so, though, would take the heat of leaders in both countries.

In his podcast appearance, Palihapitiya claimed that, since corporations and foreign nations have not actually divested from China, their rhetorical stances account for nothing. That clearly is not how the Chinese Communist Party has interpreted such criticism: Officials have devoted considerable resources to trying to change public opinion over Xinjiang and repair their reputation amid a constant stream of negative press.

The global pressure also may have helped make a difference on the ground.

There are signs that China might be susceptible to international pressure. One recent report attributing a relatively lighter grip by Chinese security services over Xinjiang attributed the minor shift in part to foreign pressure, though that interpretation has been disputed. In another case, China most definitely took note of the pressure, though not by taking the desired actions: After a group of companies like Nike and H&M that manufacture apparel in China joined a coalition to denounce the treatment of Uyghurs, China made life difficult for the coalition members.

China has also recently gone on the offensive against the U.S.’s abysmal human rights record in the Middle East, signaling that the old Cold War dynamic of mutual human rights criticism, at least some of it constructive, may yet carry over to the U.S.-China competition.

Police officers scuffle with protesters, in support of the repressed Uyghur community who live in Xinjiang in northwest China, in front of the Chinese Embassy in London on July 1, 2021.

Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

After his unfortunate episode, Palihapitiya issued a terse statement on social media expressing apparent regret for the tone of his comments: “To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere,” he said. “Full stop.”

It would be a tragic mistake if other corporate leaders and political figures embraced something similar to Palihapitiya’s callous initial position.

The reconsideration was welcome: It would be a tragic mistake if other corporate leaders and political figures embraced something similar to his callous initial position.

Contrary to what Palihapitiya claimed in his podcast, a lot of people around the world have shown that they do in fact care about foreigners living in dire circumstances, such as the Uyghurs. They have raised their voices on the subject and made it an issue that the Chinese government feels it must respond to. If that helps even some innocent people escape oppression or defend their rights, that’s a good thing.

Criticism over human rights abuses can often be cynical or hypocritical, sure, but they are far preferable to a world in which even the concept of universal dignity is simply abandoned.

The post Contra a Billionaire Bro: Why We Should Care About China’s Rights Violations in Xinjiang appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
January 15, 2022

New Novel Glimpses the Dangers Facing the Impending “Asian Century”

People walk near the India Gate monument amid heavy smog in New Delhi, India, on Oct. 28, 2016.

Photo: Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

After hundreds of years of domination by the West, the world is now primed to have an “Asian Century.” After a long period of decline, demographic and economic trends point to Asia returning to its historic role as the world’s center of economic growth as well as the incubator of political and social change. The character of what the Asian Century will look like will thus have many consequences for people across the world. There are already strong signs, evidenced in the emergence of ethnonationalist, authoritarian, and religious extremist politics across the continent, that Asia’s rise will not be any less chaotic than the West before it.

Indian author Pankaj Mishra has dedicated his career to analyzing the psychology of Asia’s rising masses, particularly its young men. His latest work, a novel, “Run and Hide,” is his most searing look at the subject yet. The book is a story about the fates of three young Indian men, graduates from the country’s most famous technical university, who rise from poverty to wealth and acclaim within a span of decades. It is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of success in the developing world and a parable for the dark side of the Asian Century — or centuries — to come.

In decades past, iconic anti-colonial Asian leaders, often educated in the West, overwhelmingly tended to be left wing. They fought against Western colonialism but espoused many ideas that were shared by Western liberals, including a belief in individual freedom, secularism, and universal human rights. It stood to reason that they represented the views of a majority of their compatriots and that the nations they led, once they became wealthy and free, would be bulwarks of liberalism. On a continent where Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, and Tayyip Erdogan are among the most popular leaders today, that assumption no longer holds any water.

The book is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of success in the developing world and a parable for the dark side of the Asian Century — or centuries — to come.

The three men in Mishra’s novel — Virendra, Aseem, and the enigmatic main character, Arun — stand as representations of millions of Asians successfully emerging to lives free from material want but wounded by cultural loss and filled with insatiable new psychological desires. To varying degrees, the men try to “trample on the past,” to quote one of the characters’ favorite lines from V.S. Naipaul, by leaving their old cultures behind. They embrace the unfamiliar pleasures of wealth and travel, even as the more slowly ascending masses of their own country turn to reaction. Humiliated by the exploding inequalities newfound wealth like that of the protagonists has helped create, most people channel their rage into support for populist parties that promise to take revenge on their behalf against liberals and minorities.

In various ways, Mishra’s characters find that they are unable to survive in the new world they inhabit. Arriving at the top of the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — the realization of their potential — they discover that the air up there is terrifyingly thin. Their wealth and success briefly elevate them before pushing them down a glide path to self-destruction.

The cover of Pankaj Mishra’s novel “Run and Hide.”

Image: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

There is a political subtext to Mishra’s book that is very important to understanding politics in the developing world: Suffering does not necessarily ennoble. People’s long-sublimated dark urges — for material goods, recognition, sex, revenge — often begin to self-destructively erupt inside them as their material conditions improve.

In one passage from “Run and Hide,” Arun, raised by a poor, abusive father who now supports Modi, addresses the enthusiasms of a liberal friend who grew up wealthy and unselfconsciously devotes herself to various progressive causes. “From what I had seen of non-white people, starting with my libtard-obsessed father, it seemed prudent to fear that, whatever their skin color, the poor and oppressed today were very likely to be persecutors tomorrow — even, sooner,” he tells her. He points out, with some discomfort, that the liberal friend’s progressive platitudes on Twitter do not, to use the example of the Arab Spring, “quite account for the fact that some brave protestors against tyranny in Tahrir Square could turn, given the chance, into rapists.”

Rising living standards in India and China have created publics with strong ultranationalist and even xenophobic views on domestic and foreign policy. These public sentiments are outpacing the capacity of their governments to fully deliver on them, even though they embrace some of those qualities. Throughout the Muslim world, democratic elections have demonstrated repeatedly that religiously conservative parties have widespread support from the masses. Even in smaller Asian countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, militarized, authoritarian politics that disregard liberal freedoms and trample on the rights of minorities have proved popular. Countries that were once deeply poor and have now felt themselves gaining a bit of strength have shown that they have potential flaws just as deep as the Westerners whose central role in global affairs they are now gradually supplanting.

Mishra’s work demonstrates that the fallibilities of publics in Asian countries are less proof of their own unique shortcomings than of the commonality of human behavior across the world.

If the mass political awakening of Asia has revealed popular sentiments that have proved deeply illiberal, that does not make Asians so different from Westerners in their political development. Even as it became the richest and most developed region of the world — thanks in part to its ruthless colonial exploitation of Asia and Africa — Europe destroyed itself with two catastrophic world wars driven by nationalism and bigotry. Far-right parties are once again on the march on the continent as they channel popular unease among majority populations over identity and immigration. The entire Donald Trump presidency, punctuated by a now-infamous riot by his supporters at the Capitol, shows that the U.S. suffers deeply from the same trends.

In this way, Mishra’s own work, including “Run and Hide,” demonstrates that the fallibilities of publics in Asian countries are less proof of their own unique shortcomings than of the commonality of human behavior and psychology across the world. If the Asian Century — symbolized by countries like India and China, let alone Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Iran, or Saudi Arabia — is to be less exploitative than the Western-dominated order that came before it, it will require giving the same ruthless scrutiny to emerging countries’ politics and social trends that we have become used to giving the West.

The 21st century is going to be Asian. For it to be successful, it will require a lot of painful criticism of the type that Mishra gives in his novel. The West should bring those assessments to bear when warranted, for our own good — but mainly for theirs.

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.
January 9, 2022

The Silence — or Worse — of Human Rights Hawks on U.S. Sanctions Against Afghanistan

A general view of a camp where some families make a living from begging, and others consider selling their children due to poverty in Qala-E-Naw, Afghanistan, on Oct. 28, 2021.

Photo: Ahmad Seddiqi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Months after the U.S.-backed Afghan government fell to the Taliban, ordinary Afghans now face what could be their direst winter in decades. Thanks to the economic collapse that accompanied the U.S. military withdrawal, coupled with the imposition of sanctions and the cessation of much humanitarian aid, millions of Afghans must contend with the very real prospect of starvation. Some will die. Many will lose their lives to preventable deaths.

While limited humanitarian exceptions for trade have been carved out in recent weeks, the World Health Organization has already warned that up to 1 million Afghan children may die as a result of malnutrition over this winter if drastic steps are not taken. Children are already bearing the brunt of the humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by horrifying stories of kids being sold to pay for food. And the country’s notoriously harsh winter is already taking a toll: Afghans are freezing to death as they flee the country with their families.

U.S. sanctions policy is directly to blame, pushing Afghans over the edge as they already struggle to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and the political upheaval created by the collapse of the central government. As Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote this December, after returning from a trip to Afghanistan on behalf of the WHO, “I can clearly state that if the United States and other Western governments do not change their Afghanistan sanction policies, more Afghans will die from sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban.”

The deaths will be brought about as a result of deliberate policy decisions made in the U.S. Alongside new sanctions imposed after the Taliban takeover, the U.S. froze nearly $10 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank holdings here. The Biden administration refuses to release the funds despite ongoing public protests by Afghans.

As all of this plays out, the clamor of voices criticizing the U.S. military withdrawal this summer on humanitarian grounds has gone deadly silent. After the withdrawal, many commentators and political leaders claimed that there was a humanitarian imperative behind the conflict, particularly the protection Afghan women. Many of the humanitarian and feminist arguments had been used for years to help justify a military occupation that was often despised by the same people it was ostensibly defending. In contrast, ending the current sanctions regime and releasing funds owned by Afghans actually would do something unambiguously positive for civilians there, including women and children who are particularly at risk.

The cognitive dissonance on display is perhaps best underlined by Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This summer, McCaul decried the fate of Afghan women. “We’re seeing this nightmare unfold — unmitigated disaster of epic proportions,” he said in an interview. “And what I really worried about the most are the women left behind and what’s going to happen to them.” When the Biden administration then put sanctions exemptions in place to allow some humanitarian aid, McCaul then turned around to condemn the limited relief — even as news reports described the economic collapse wreaking havoc on the lives of Afghans, including women and children.

With this new nightmare unfolding, the concern shown in August has largely faded.

Afghans holding banners take part in a protest and march towards the former US embassy building demanding the release of Afghanistan’s frozen assets and resuming international funds amid worsening economic conditions and rising poverty in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 21, 2021.

Photo: Bilal Guler/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Many Failures of Sanctions

Sanctions are one of the bluntest coercive tools in the U.S. foreign policy toolkit — and happen be a favorite of policymakers, even as they rarely produce political results. Afghanistan is just one example of a mindlessly cruel sanctions regime that wreaks havoc on entire civilian populations without accountability. For decades, Iranians have been subjected to some of the most crushing sanctions on earth. Obstacles are erected against even the most anodyne business ventures. Young people there are unable to envision a fruitful life in the country. The sanctions on Iran were intensified under the Trump administration but have continued under President Joe Biden, as part of a desperate effort to force a total capitulation over Iran’s nuclear program.

Even Cold War-era sanctions on countries like Cuba continue to remain in effect to this day, absent any compelling geopolitical reasons. In a recent example that underlined the parodic nature of the Cuba sanctions policy, the rental company Airbnb was hit with a fine for doing business on the island and allowing Cubans access to its accommodation services. This was just the latest limitation on ordinary Cubans’ ability to conduct basic economic transactions or engage in trade with companies headquartered abroad and thus at risk of U.S. sanctions. Despite being in place for years and making life hard for Cubans, the sanctions have done little to further U.S. foreign policy objectives.

“The sanctions on Cuba have been completely ineffective in achieving their policy goals,” said William LeoGrande, a government professor at American University and an expert on the Cuban sanctions regime. “They haven’t brought about regime change. All they’ve done really is inflict pain on the Cuban people.”

The situation in Afghanistan may yet stand out as one of the deadliest instances of violence against civilians inflicted by U.S. sanctions. The Afghan government that was built over two decades of American occupation was created to be wholly dependent on foreign support, particularly its health care system. With the abrupt withdrawal of aid and the imposition of sanctions, millions of Afghans, including women and children, are now at risk.

It seems unlikely that sanctions will do what 20 years of war could not: build a stable government that keeps the Taliban out of power.

More stories of starvation, death from the cold, and families broken apart by economic need are likely to result from the present approach of preventing access to funds owned by the Afghan government and denying aid. And it seems unlikely that such measures will do what 20 years of war could not: build a stable government that keeps the Taliban out of power.

Though sanctions on Afghanistan won’t achieve U.S. political aims, they are, as in so many other countries, succeeding in visiting cruel consequences upon the most vulnerable. House Democrats have called on Biden to release funds owned by Afghanistan’s central bank, but the administration has so far been resistant to this step. One reason could be that reversing course would reveal the brutality of the underlying policy — employing sanctions to deny foreign nations’ central banks access to their funds — which the U.S. government continues to do in other cases. Meanwhile, the broader sanctions regime on Afghanistan remains in place, with ordinary Afghans bearing the brunt.

“To help Afghanistan make progress on the humanitarian front, it is simply not enough to just give aid to Afghanistan. Washington’s financial warfare against the country must end,” wrote Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics and an adjunct fellow at the American Security Project. “Those in the West who voiced so much concern about the lack of freedom for Afghan women under the Taliban ought to also care about their survival this winter.”

The post The Silence — or Worse — of Human Rights Hawks on U.S. Sanctions Against Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.
December 28, 2021

Ele rejeitou a oferta do FBI para se tornar um informante. Depois, sua vida foi arruinada.

Aswad Khan não entendeu por que as pessoas estavam lhe dando os parabéns. Em uma manhã de fevereiro de 2017, saindo da cama em sua casa em um bairro de classe média alta em Karachi, no Paquistão, Khan viu uma enxurrada de mensagens de texto que tinham chegado na noite anterior, em sua maioria de velhos amigos da faculdade e do ensino médio, muitos deles vivendo nos Estados Unidos. Eles estavam lhe desejando sucesso a respeito de uma boa notícia que ele ainda não havia recebido. Ainda com sono, ele começou a vasculhar o telefone e verificar as mensagens.

Khan, então com 31 anos, logo se deparou com um texto que revelava o que estava acontecendo. “Parabéns irmão, seu melhor amigo vai se casar!”, dizia a mensagem. “Você deve estar tão feliz”.

Ele não conseguia acreditar no que tinha acabado de ler.

Khan imediatamente entrou no Facebook para checar o perfil de seu melhor amigo de infância, Ahmed. Ele percebeu rápido que Ahmed tinha parado de segui-lo e restringiu seu acesso ao perfil. Enquanto isso, as páginas de seus outros amigos estavam parabenizando Ahmed pelo noivado e pelo casamento que aparentemente ele havia anunciado que aconteceria naquele verão. Ahmed, cujo nome completo não é citado neste texto a pedido de Khan e que não respondeu aos pedidos de comentários para a reportagem, havia compartilhado cada momento de sua vida com Khan desde que eles eram crianças. No entanto, ele não havia sequer contado a Khan sobre o noivado.

“Só naquele momento eu percebi que ele tinha me excluído da vida dele sem dizer uma palavra.”

“Só naquele momento eu percebi que ele tinha me excluído da vida dele sem dizer uma palavra. Ele até deixou de me seguir no Facebook, no Instagram. Não consigo nem explicar como me senti humilhado e destroçado”, disse Khan. “As pessoas me enviavam mensagens de todo o mundo dizendo que estavam ansiosas para me ver no casamento dele. Eu nem sabia como responder a elas”.

Khan deitou-se de novo na cama, as lágrimas ardendo nos olhos. Ele havia vivenciado tantas pequenas traições ao longo dos anos desde que seus problemas com o governo dos EUA começaram: conhecidos que cortaram laços discretamente, telefonemas e mensagens jamais respondidos, e mesmo pais de amigos dizendo a seus filhos que o incômodo de ser alguém próximo dele era grande demais.

Um jovem bonito e atlético que estava acostumado a ser o centro das atenções nos seus tempos de ensino médio, Khan — embora nunca tivesse sido acusado de um crime — era agora um pária. Ele havia mergulhado em uma espiral descendente de depressão, ansiedade e noites sem dormir. Cada amizade perdida, ou rumor sobre si mesmo que ouvia, dava um novo golpe em sua autoestima. Ficar sabendo através de outras pessoas que seu melhor amigo de infância ia se casar, um casamento para o qual ele não seria convidado, era o pior golpe de todos até ali.

O lento desmoronar da vida pessoal de Khan tinha começado quase uma década mais cedo, com uma visita inesperada do FBI. Khan tinha sido um aluno internacional da Universidade Northeastern, em Boston, para estudar administração de empresas. Em 2011, depois de se graduar, ele retornou aos EUA com um visto de visitante. Enquanto estava com a família, ele foi abordado pelo FBI para se tornar um informante pago. Khan recusou.

Após deixar o país algumas semanas depois, acreditam Khan e sua equipe jurídica, ele foi colocado na lista de impedidos de voar dos EUA e também na lista de vigilância de terroristas. “Eu diria que é muito provável que ele esteja na lista de vigilância”, disse Naz Ahmad, advogado da equipe do Criando Prestação de Contas e Responsabilidade no Cumprimento da Lei, ou CLEAR na sigla em inglês, um projeto da Escola de Direito da Universidade da Cidade de Nova York, que trabalhou no caso de Khan. Provar sua presença em uma lista secreta, por definição, é impossível sem confirmação do governo, mas Ahmad disse que há fortes possibilidades disso considerando o assédio sofrido por pessoas ligadas a Khan ao tentar entrar nos EUA, bem como comentários feitos pelas autoridades ao antigo advogado dele.

Desde o dia em que deixou o país, Khan não voltou aos EUA, onde em outros tempos ele costumava passar todos os verões com a família em Connecticut, formou-se na faculdade e até se tornou um torcedor fanático do time de basquete dos Boston Celtics. “Eu diria que os cinco anos que passei em Boston foram os melhores da minha vida, sem dúvida alguma. Eu recomendaria Boston a qualquer pessoa”, disse Khan. “Eu vinha aos Estados Unidos desde criança, visitando a Disney World, viajando por todo o país. Eu adorava. O tempo que passei lá fez com que eu me tornasse a pessoa que sou hoje”.

“O FBI tem todo esse poder sobre você. Eles são os guardiões de sua prisão, mesmo que você não tenha feito nada de errado para justificar ser colocado lá dentro.”

Após aquele fatídica visita do FBI, muitos dos contatos de Khan que viajaram para os EUA começaram a ser repetidamente detidos na imigração americana, às vezes por horas. Entre os que eram parados pelas autoridades estavam seus amigos e conhecidos no Paquistão, assim como pessoas com as quais ele estava apenas casualmente conectado nas redes sociais. Uma característica constante dessas detenções, algo que pelo menos cinco dos contatos de Khan confirma, é que eles foram questionados na fronteira sobre seu relacionamento com ele. Os contatos disseram que os funcionários do serviço de Alfândega e Proteção de Fronteiras dos EUA sugeriram a eles durante os interrogatórios que Khan era uma pessoa perigosa, um possível terrorista. Os oficiais deixaram claro que ele era a fonte de seus problemas para entrar no país.

Para muitos de seus amigos, a pressão era insuportável. Pessoas que Khan conhecia há anos começaram a telefonar para se desculpar, pois teriam que deixar de ser suas amigas nas redes sociais. Em casamentos em Karachi, outros convidados começaram a pedir para que ele fosse excluído das fotografias em grupo. Seus convites para eventos começaram a rarear. Os cônjuges e pais de seus amigos começaram a dizer que ser do círculo próximo de Khan não compensava o incômodo. Eles até se perguntavam se, contra todas as indicações de sua vida comum como gerente de um negócio de publicidade no Paquistão, Khan realmente não teria feito algo de errado para justificar todo esse escrutínio.

“Eles estão assediando todos os meus amigos durante horas sempre que viaja, e fizeram com que até meus melhores amigos não quisessem mais falar comigo”, disse Khan. “É como se eu estivesse em uma prisão virtual por estar nessa lista. O FBI tem todo esse poder sobre você. Eles são os guardiões de sua prisão, mesmo que você não tenha feito nada de errado para justificar ser colocado lá dentro”.

Aswad Khan em um clube em Boston, em 2009.

Foto: Cortesia de Aswad Khan

Nas últimas duas décadas, desde os atentados de 11 de setembro de 2001, uma das atividades centrais do FBI tem sido o recrutamento de informantes. Embora números mais atualizados não estejam disponíveis, estimativas anteriores colocaram o total de informantes trabalhando nos EUA em mais de 15 mil. Muitas dessas pessoas são muçulmanos americanos ou imigrantes vindos de países de maioria muçulmana. Para aqueles que rejeitam uma oferta para se tornar informantes, as consequências podem ser sérias.

“Há várias pessoas que acusaram o FBI de colocá-las na lista de impedidos de voar por se recusarem a ser informantes”, disse Michael German, um ex-agente do FBI que agora é membro do programa de liberdade e segurança nacional do Centro Brennan para a Justiça. “Os agentes precisam ter informantes, e é por isso que eles vão a essas expedições tentando fisgá-los. Quando as pessoas se recusam, muitas vezes eles se tornam vingativos. Eles partem do princípio de que ‘nós lhe demos uma chance de provar que você está do nosso lado e sua recusa em nos ajudar significa que você está contra nós’”.

“Há várias pessoas que acusaram o FBI de colocá-las na lista de impedidos de voar por se recusarem a ser informantes. Quando as pessoas se recusam, muitas vezes eles se tornam vingativos.”

No final de 2016, o Intercept escreveu sobre uma série de documentos fornecidos por um denunciante do FBI revelando como as agências de segurança nacional dos EUA usam o sistema de migração e os postos de fronteira como um meio de reunir informações e recrutar informantes. Os documentos expõem em detalhes como o FBI e o serviço de Alfândega e Proteção de Fronteiras cooperaram para direcionar listas de pessoas de países de interesse, com o FBI ajudando a identificar indivíduos para triagem adicional, entrevistas e visitas de acompanhamento.

Nenhuma investigação ativa ou suspeita de atividade criminosa é necessária para fazer essas abordagens; o FBI apenas tem que sugerir que a pessoa em questão poderia fornecer informações úteis. De acordo com a informação pública mais recente disponível, as autoridades podem coletar informações sobre alguém, que é seguida por uma “nomeação” dessa pessoa para as listas; o FBI é uma das agências que fazem a nomeação. Depois vem um processo, incluindo a suposta fase de checagens minuciosas, que frequentemente coloca as pessoas em listas de vigilância apesar da falta de provas concretas que as ligam ao terrorismo.

Uma apresentação do FBI disse, como os funcionários também disseram a Khan, que as autoridades não estão procurando “bandidos” para pressionar a se tornarem informantes, mas “bons rapazes”. Aos agentes individuais foi dado amplo poder de decisão sobre a forma como lidavam com essas situações. O resultado, segundo o delator do FBI Terry Albury contou recentemente ao New York Times, era uma cultura de racismo e maldade, com agentes pressionando indivíduos a espionar suas comunidades e frequentemente destruindo as vidas de pessoas inocentes no processo.

“É muito típico ouvir falar de alguém pressionado a se tornar um informante que se recusa e sofre retaliação sendo colocado na lista de impedidos de voar”, disse Hina Shamsi, diretora do projeto de segurança nacional da União Americana de Liberdades Civis, a ACLU. “O que é pior neste caso é que, por se tratar de alguém que não é cidadão americano, todos esses problemas são exacerbados: o recurso já constitucionalmente inadequado disponível aos cidadãos e residentes permanentes colocados nessa lista não está nem sequer disponível para ele”.

Khan se recuperou do golpe de não ter sido convidado para o casamento de seu melhor amigo. Embora ele não possa provar que está em uma lista de vigilância, muito menos saber quem o colocou lá, Khan não pôde deixar de pensar que sua vida havia sido destruída por causa de uma decisão tomada por capricho de um agente do FBI que ele havia conhecido anos atrás, cuja oferta para se tornar um informante ele havia recusado. Khan não tinha como limpar seu nome ou consertar sua reputação despedaçada. Até hoje, ele nunca foi acusado de qualquer ato ilícito.

“Vivi uma vida limpa e nunca me meti em nenhum tipo de problema em nenhum lugar do mundo. Isso realmente me afetou. Eu amo os Estados Unidos, e amei cada parte da minha vida lá. Ainda hoje eu gostaria de poder ir ver os Celtics jogando no TD Garden, ver minha antiga faculdade e ir visitar meus amigos e família”, disse ele. “Ninguém jamais me acusou de fazer nada, então não consigo ver onde está a justiça nisso tudo. Parece que um cara do FBI simplesmente decidiu que ia arruinar minha vida sem nenhuma razão”.

A sede do FBI em Washington, D.C., em 2 de janeiro de 2021.

Foto: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Na manhã de 9 de fevereiro de 2012, Khan, então com 26 anos, acordou ao som de um estrondo na porta da frente da casa de sua tia em New Britain, no estado de Connecticut. Seus tios e primos tinham saído, deixando-o sozinho em casa. Ele estava nos Estados Unidos com um visto de visitante, tendo chegado em outubro do ano anterior, e estava perto do fim da sua estadia de seis meses. Enquanto os batidos na porta da frente continuavam, o celular de Khan tocava com o número de sua prima exibido no identificador de chamadas. Pensando que era ela na porta e que talvez tivesse esquecido algo no caminho para o trabalho, ele pegou o telefone. “Ei, devo ir abrir a porta?”

“Não é sua prima. Aqui é o FBI. Venha até a porta agora e não desligue o telefone”.

“Não é sua prima”, respondeu secamente a voz de um homem. “Aqui é o FBI. Venha até a porta agora e não desligue o telefone”.

O coração de Khan disparou imediatamente. Ele não tinha ideia da razão pela qual o FBI apareceria à sua porta ou como eles poderiam falsificar os números de telefone de sua família para contatá-lo. Ele desceu com o telefone em mãos conforme as instruções, enquanto os oficiais continuavam batendo de forma agressiva na porta. Quando ele a abriu, dois homens de terno estavam ali parados esperando por ele. Eles lhe mostraram seus crachás, um do FBI e outro de um detetive da polícia estadual de Connecticut. Os policiais eram Andrew Klopfer, o agente do FBI, e o então detetive Andrew Burke, segundo relatou Khan e um email de um de seus advogados confirmando sua lembrança dos nomes dos homens.

Khan, dando o melhor de si para reprimir o terror desta visita repentina, tentou elucidar o que estava acontecendo. Seu corpo de 1,90 m ocupava a maior parte da porta, e ele conversou com os policiais agarrado à lateral dela.

“Perguntei como poderia ajudá-los, e eles disseram que só queriam falar comigo. Depois disseram que precisavam me levar para outro local para que pudéssemos conversar e que era para minha própria segurança, bem como a segurança deles”, disse Khan. “Perguntei se eu precisava de um advogado ou algo do tipo e eles me disseram que isso não seria necessário. A essa altura eu já estava tão nervoso e assustado, que estava tremendo. Estava apenas tentando descobrir porque esses caras estavam aqui e me procurando”.

Os agentes disseram a Khan que iriam levá-lo a um restaurante local para que pudessem tomar café da manhã e conversar. Ainda usando seu pijama, ele perguntou se poderia se trocar. Após recusarem inicialmente, os policiais cederam, seguindo-o pela casa e esperando no andar de baixo enquanto ele subia. Khan então os seguiu até o carro deles.

“Eles me colocaram no banco da frente. A primeira coisa que me disseram foi que sou um cara muito alto e não pensavam que eu seria tão alto”, disse Khan. “Eles disseram que tinham gente me observando na última semana e que carros estavam me acompanhando, e perguntaram se eu havia notado. Eu disse a eles que não tinha”.

Os policiais dirigiram por cerca de 15 minutos até o restaurante. Depois de sentar-se com ele a uma das mesas, disseram-lhe para pedir algo para o café da manhã. Ainda aterrorizado e lutando para compreender a virada surreal que sua manhã havia tomado, Khan pediu um copo de suco e um omelete. Os oficiais, que também pediram comida, o encheram de perguntas sobre o que fazia no Paquistão, por que estava visitando os Estados Unidos, onde frequentou a faculdade e como era a situação financeira de sua família.

Após cerca de 20 minutos, Klopfer, o agente do FBI, chegou no objetivo do encontro: eles queriam que Khan trabalhasse para eles.

“Eles disseram que queriam que eu trabalhasse e fornecesse informações, e que poderia ser nos EUA ou no Paquistão. Eu pergunte qual era o trabalho que eles estavam descrevendo especificamente, e eles disseram diretamente que queriam que eu fosse um informante e espionasse mesquitas nos EUA ou no Paquistão”, disse Khan. “Neste momento, eu nem sabia exatamente o que significava um ‘informante’, então perguntei a eles. Eles me disseram que significava estar do lado dos bons, referindo-se a eles próprios, e ir nesses lugares para obter informações para eles”.

Khan tinha vindo de uma família relativamente abastada no Paquistão que havia pagado para ele estudar nos Estados Unidos. Ele disse aos policiais que não precisava de um emprego. De todo modo, ele não seria o melhor perfil para a função, acrescentou, descrevendo-se como alguém barulhento e sociável, e não o tipo de pessoa capaz de guardar segredos sombrios. Os oficiais disseram que o FBI poderia lhe proporcionar a cidadania americana, dinheiro e outras regalias; prometeram que quem trabalhasse para eles se tornaria uma pessoa poderosa com conexões que os tornariam “intocáveis” (o FBI se recusou a prestar comentários para esta reportagem ou disponibilizar Klopfer para responder perguntas. Nem Burke nem a Polícia Estadual de Connecticut responderam a uma solicitação por comentários).

A certa altura, os agentes lembraram que o governo estava pagando pelo suco e pelo omelete que ele estava comendo. Nesse ponto, porém, sabendo o objetivo da reunião, Khan só estava concentrado em chegar em casa o mais rapidamente possível e encontrar ajuda.

“Eu lhes disse que não era nada de mais. ‘Ok, são 10 dólares. Eu pago, pago até mesmo pela sua refeição’”, disse Khan. “A única coisa em minha mente naquele momento era pensar em como sair agora mesmo dessa situação e chegar em casa para contar à minha tia o que diabos está acontecendo”.

Embora ele quisesse a cidadania americana — oferecendo-lhe a chance de passar mais tempo em um país que amava, com a família e amigos — a ideia de se tornar um informante estava fora de questão. Mesmo não frequentando a mesquita regularmente, ele não queria ser enviado pelo FBI para espionar as pessoas durante suas orações. Os policiais continuaram a fazer ofertas, e Khan continuou a rejeitá-las.

“Eu lhes disse: ‘respeito vocês e o que vocês fazem. Vocês colocam suas vidas em risco para proteger a nós e o povo dos Estados Unidos, mas eu não sou talhado para ser espião nem estou interessado nas coisas que vocês estão me oferecendo’”, recordou Khan. “Eu disse: ‘tenho uma ficha limpa e vivi aqui durante anos sem nunca fazer nada de errado’. Eles disseram: ‘é por isso que queremos você. não vamos atrás de arruaceiros, queremos que pessoas de bem trabalhem para nós’”.

Vendo que seus esforços para seduzi-lo oferecendo ajuda em relação à imigração e dinheiro não chegavam a lugar algum, os policiais logo começaram a tomar um caminho diferente. Eles lhe perguntaram o nome de várias organizações terroristas sediadas no Paquistão: será que ele conhecia esses grupos? As organizações estavam sediadas principalmente nas regiões tribais do país, longe da área urbana de Karachi, onde Khan vivia, e ele lhes disse que nunca havia encontrado ninguém que tivesse conexões com os grupos.

Após cerca de duas horas de conversa tensa, os agentes colocaram Khan de volta no carro e o levaram para casa. Abalado pela ansiedade, ele não conseguiu sequer tocar na comida. Agora ele estava apenas contente por esta provação assustadora estar prestes a terminar. Antes de partir, disse Khan, Klopfer deu instruções estritas para que não contasse a ninguém sobre a reunião: nem para a família e especialmente para um advogado. Eles disseram que entrariam em contato novamente em breve.

Aswad Khan verifica seu telefone em sua casa com seu cão Storm nas proximidades, em Karachi, Paquistão, em 21 de novembro de 2021.

Foto: Cortesia de Aswad Khan

Tão logo os policiais foram embora, Khan imediatamente telefonou para a tia para contar-lhe o que havia acontecido: que o FBI o havia pegado em casa, que estavam lhe oferecendo dinheiro e benefícios para trabalhar para eles como informante, e que ele estava assustado. Ela e a prima de Khan correram do trabalho para casa e chamaram um advogado em Bridgeport para marcar um encontro para mais tarde naquele mesmo dia. Quando chegaram, o advogado, Christian Young, levou os números dos agentes do FBI e da polícia estadual de Connecticut que haviam pegado Khan. Young ligou para os oficiais e disse-lhe para não contatarem Khan novamente sem ligar para ele antes.

Uma semana mais tarde, segundo Khan, Klopfer ligou para Young e disse que queria entrevistar Khan novamente diante de um procurador federal. Young aconselhou Khan a ir na reunião e disse que ele estaria lá para garantir que tudo corresse bem, disse Khan (Young não quis comentar os fatos para esta reportagem). A entrevista foi marcada para pouco mais de uma semana depois. Querendo causar uma impressão de confiança, ao contrário da última reunião na qual os oficiais tinham aparecido em sua casa no início da manhã sem aviso prévio, Khan apareceu de terno e gravata.

“Nessa altura, eu já sabia que Andrew Klopfer estava irritado comigo”, disse Khan, observando que o agente do FBI estava muito mais impassível do que na primeira reunião. “Eu fiz exatamente o que ele não queria que eu fizesse, contando para minha tia e indo atrás de um advogado. Eu não servia mais para aquilo que eles queriam que eu fizesse”.

Por cerca de duas horas e meia, Klopfer, Burke, Khan e seu advogado sentaram-se com o então procurador-assistente dos EUA Stephen B. Reynolds em uma sala de reuniões no escritório do FBI em Bridgeport. Na presença de Reynolds, cuja identidade foi confirmada por Khan e um advogado que trabalhou no caso posteriormente, os policiais fizeram a Khan todas as mesmas perguntas sobre sua vida e seus antecedentes que haviam feito no restaurante (a Procuradoria dos EUA para o Distrito de Connecticut se recusou a comentar. Nem Reynolds nem o Departamento de Justiça responderam às solicitações por comentários).

Uma descrição desta reunião, que também fez referência à reunião anterior de Khan com o FBI no restaurante, foi obtida anos depois como parte de um pedido da Lei de Liberdade de Informação, ou FOIA, enviado por Ahmad, o advogado ligado ao projeto CLEAR. O documento descreve as visões que Khan expressou na reunião sobre várias questões, incluindo detalhes de sua vida como estudante nos Estados Unidos, relações com membros da família, planos futuros de carreira, assim como suas opiniões políticas.

“Eu fui um cidadão cumpridor da lei e não queria nenhum problema com vocês. Mas parece que se eu não tivesse a pele escura, nem fosse paquistanês e muçulmano, eu não estaria aqui.”

Quaisquer referências a terrorismo ou ofertas para trabalhar como informante ou não estão nos documentos ou foram escondidas pelas muitas censuras, que a resposta ao pedido via FOIA diz que foram feitas porque o material “revelaria técnicas e procedimentos utilizados na investigação e aplicação da lei”. De acordo com Khan, as censuras se correlacionam com aquelas partes da conversa em que os oficiais passaram de perguntas mundanas sobre a vida e a política para perguntar-lhe sobre grupos e ataques terroristas específicos. Quando os agentes começaram a adotar essa linha de questionamento, Khan se voltou para Reynolds e se dirigiu diretamente a ele.

“Eu lhe disse que meus pais tinham gastado muito dinheiro para que eu estudasse nos Estados Unidos e que eu adorava a vida aqui. Eu nunca tinha entrado em uma briga, nunca tinha sido multado no trânsito e nem tinha dívidas. Eu fui um cidadão cumpridor da lei e não queria nenhum problema com vocês. Mas parece que se eu não tivesse a pele escura, nem fosse paquistanês e muçulmano, eu não estaria aqui”, disse Khan. “O procurador disse que não era assim e que não se trata de uma situação racista. Ele disse que sempre há circunstâncias mais amplas para se tomar conhecimento e que eles têm o direito de fazer perguntas sobre terroristas para fins de segurança”.

Khan disse a Reynolds que precisava visitar o hospital para ver seu tio doente no final do dia. Reynold anunciou que Khan estava livre para sair e desejou ao tio uma rápida recuperação. Ao sair do escritório, Khan notou que nem Klopfer nem Burke lhe disseram nada ou fizeram contato visual na saída.

Por um momento, pareceu que seus problemas estavam resolvidos. Khan ainda tinha algumas semanas sobrando na sua viagem de seis meses aos UEA. Seu advogado lhe disse para ficar até o último dia, para deixar claro que ele não tinha feito nada de errado e não estava fugindo. Khan seguiu o conselho e passou as semanas restantes com a família e amigos. Com o tempo, a assustadora visita matinal do FBI começou a se apagar em sua mente.

Um mês mais tarde, na área de embarque do Aeroporto Internacional John F. Kennedy, em Nova York, Khan recebeu uma marcação SSSS — abreviação de “seleção para verificação de segurança secundária”, em inglês — em seu cartão de embarque pela primeira vez na vida. Ele recebeu uma atenção extra no posto de controle de segurança, mas fora isso as coisas pareciam normais. Ele embarcou em seu voo de volta ao Paquistão sem preocupações, já fazendo planos em sua cabeça para a próxima visita.

Aquele momento no Aeroporto Kennedy, no início de abril de 2012, seria a última vez que Khan pisaria nos Estados Unidos. Sem que ele soubesse, foi também o início de um novo capítulo sombrio em sua vida: a partir daquele momento, sua reputação, sua vida social e as promessas para seu futuro começariam a dar errado.

A área de segurança no Aeroporto Internacional John F. Kennedy em 4 de março de 2014.

Foto: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Para Khan — e as pessoas ao seu redor — os problemas começaram quase imediatamente após sua chegada ao Paquistão, semanas depois de sua última reunião com o FBI e o procurador. Embora, devido ao sigilo do processo, Khan não tenha provas de que Klopfer, Burke ou qualquer outra pessoa o tenha colocado em uma lista de vigilância, seus amigos começaram a ter problemas na fronteira dos EUA e o nome de Khan continuou aparecendo. Em maio de 2012, um amigo de infância, Faisal Munshi, com dupla cidadania paquistanesa-canadense, foi parado na fronteira dos Estados Unidos e questionado sobre Khan.

Dono de um grande negócio de fornecimento de alimentos e detentor dos direitos de franquia para o Paquistão de uma rede multinacional de pizzarias, Munshi ia de Toronto para os Estados Unidos para participar da conferência bienal da empresa em Las Vegas. “Todos os franqueados do mundo vão para lá, e eu estava planejando participar, como sempre fiz”, disse Munshi.

Ele foi interrogado durante horas sobre Khan, incluindo perguntas sobre uma passagem de avião que ele havia lhe comprado quando eles eram estudantes universitários, em 2007.

“Eles me disseram que eu havia comprado um bilhete para esse cara, Aswad Khan, vir me visitar em Toronto três ou quatro anos atrás, e eu lhes disse que sim, era verdade que eu tinha comprado uma passagem com minhas milhas aéreas porque ele era meu amigo de infância e vários de nós íamos nos reunir para as férias de primavera”, disse Munshi.

Após várias horas de interrogatório pelos agentes de imigração, ele foi dito que as autoridades estavam negando sua entrada nos EUA. Os agentes disseram a Munshi que ele poderia recorrer ao Programa de Consulta de Retificação de Viajantes, um mecanismo administrativo mantido pelo Departamento de Segurança Nacional para ajudar pessoas que enfrentam dificuldades de viajar a esclarecer seu status. Quando Munshi escreveu, ele recebeu uma mensagem inconclusiva que não confirmava nem negava sua presença em nenhuma lista.

Um ano depois, Munshi tentou participar de outra conferência da empresa nos EUA, desta vez com planos de voar vindo de Dubai. A tentativa terminou em fracasso novamente, com Munshi sendo informado pelas autoridades na sala de embarque do aeroporto de Dubai que ele não tinha permissão para seguir viagem.

Cada vez mais preocupado com essas restrições ameaçadoras ao seu movimento, Munshi, que é casado com uma cidadã americana e viajou para os Estados Unidos regularmente ao longo de sua vida, retornou ao Canadá e procurou aconselhamento jurídico. Um advogado sugeriu que ele tentasse atravessar a fronteira terrestre na próxima vez. Em 2014, dois anos após ter sua entrada nos EUA rejeitada pela primeira vez, Munshi foi de carro a uma passagem de fronteira em Buffalo, no estado de Nova York, na esperança de ser autorizado a entrar no país para ir na formatura de sua cunhada. Foi aí que sua situação se tornou muito mais alarmante.

“Dirigir até Buffalo e ser detido lá foi a pior experiência da minha vida”, disse Munshi. “Eu não podia acreditar na forma como fui tratado, com a suposição de que eu era um criminoso”. Eles me mantiveram lá por seis horas, alternando entre salas diferentes, uma delas onde me deixaram passando frio por um tempo prolongado, e separado dos meus pais. Falei com um oficial de imigração atrás do outro, e sempre que perguntava qual era o problema, eles sempre me diziam que era algo que vinha de cima”.

Pensando que poderia ajudar a reforçar que ele era uma pessoa comum que não representava nenhuma ameaça, Munshi havia trazido uma carta da sede corporativa americana da Domino’s confirmando sua identidade e seu papel como chefe das operações da pizzaria no Paquistão.

“Os agentes fronteiriços me perguntaram por que eu estava tentando entrar nos Estados Unidos, e eu lhes disse que tinha família lá e também dirigia um grande negócio no Paquistão com sede nos EUA, e que frequentemente eu precisava participar de conferências e reuniões”, disse Munshi. “Eles então me perguntaram se eu utilizo a renda desse negócio para financiar o terrorismo. Eu lhes disse que obviamente não fazia isso. Eu venho de uma boa família e eles mesmos podem me procurar online para ver meu histórico”.

Após várias horas, Munshi foi informado pelos agentes de fronteira que sua entrada havia sido outra vez negada. Os funcionários não apresentaram nenhuma razão nem fizeram acusações específicas contra ele durante seis horas de interrogatório. A única pista que ele tinha para explicar por que havia se tornado indesejável nos EUA de forma repentina, um país para o qual ele havia viajado toda a sua vida, era a pergunta que ele havia recebido durante aquela primeira entrevista: a passagem aérea que ele havia comprado para seu amigo Aswad Khan.

Munshi não estava sozinho. Outro amigo de infância de Khan, um cidadão paquistanês casado com uma canadense, também foi detido na fronteira dos Estados Unidos e questionado sobre Khan em várias ocasiões desde 2012. Como vários outros que falaram com o Intercept e que tiveram a mesma experiência, ele pediu para permanecer anônimo por medo de represálias.

“Uma vez, quando aterrissei no aeroporto de Chicago no início de 2017, havia dois agentes esperando na área de passaportes que se aproximaram e disseram que estavam esperando”, disse Y. ao Intercept. “Eles me levaram para uma área de interrogatório e me mostraram uma foto de Aswad”.

“As pessoas fofocam, e chegou um ponto em que muitas pessoas nem mesmo queriam conhecer Aswad.”

Os agentes de imigração questionaram Y. por várias horas junto com sua esposa. Eles perguntaram sobre sua amizade com Khan, como Khan ganhava a vida, e como ele usava sua renda. “Eu disse aos agentes que eles estavam cometendo um erro com essas perguntas sobre Aswad e que eles estavam atrás do cara errado”, disse Y. “Eles me disseram que fariam as perguntas que quisessem. Então eles disseram diretamente em frente à minha esposa que, se eles estavam fazendo esse tipo de perguntas sobre Aswad, isso significa que ele é uma pessoa com quem eu não deveria estar me associando”.

Como vários outros que falaram com o Intercept, Y., que viaja frequentemente para os EUA a trabalho, apagou o contato de Khan de seu telefone e de suas contas nas redes sociais. Ele ligou para Khan para pedir desculpas quando fez isso, dizendo que estava abalado com o assédio que havia começado a enfrentar. A experiência foi um ponto de tensão em sua amizade, embora, ao contrário de muitos outros, Y. tivesse pelo menos falado com Khan sobre isso.

Em Karachi, rumores se espalharam muito além de seus amigos íntimos: estar conectado de alguma forma a Khan era um caminho certo para se meter em problemas na fronteira dos EUA.

“As pessoas fofocam, e chegou um ponto em que muitas pessoas nem mesmo queriam conhecer Aswad”, disse Munshi. “Eles começaram a pensar que talvez ele realmente tivesse feito algo de errado, e que essa era a razão de ter esses problemas com o governo dos Estados Unidos. Eles começaram a pensar que talvez fosse por causa dele que seus amigos e outras pessoas que eles conheciam tinham começado a ter os mesmos problemas também. As pessoas começaram a excluí-lo do Facebook. Tinham medo de serem associadas a ele de alguma forma”.

Aswad Khan no trabalho como CEO da MAQ Communications em Karachi, no Paquistão, em 8 de fevereiro de 2020.

Foto: Cortesia de Aswad Khan

Para Khan, tudo havia começado naquele encontro com o FBI. Desde então, mais de dez de seus amigos lhe contaram sobre problemas sérios quando viajavam para os EUA, incluindo questões sobre ele e até mesmo declarações de agentes de imigração dizendo às pessoas para manterem distância de Khan se quisessem evitar problemas. Outros nunca contaram a Khan sobre qualquer problema, mas, em vez disso, desapareceram de sua vida sem qualquer palavra. Khan começou a notar que amigos e conhecidos estavam removendo suas conexões com ele, no Facebook e no Instagram. Suas ligações telefônicas e mensagens de texto ficaram sem resposta. Os convites para casamentos e festas começaram a secar. Para um jovem conhecido ao longo de sua vida como alguém com uma vida social muito ativa, parecia que o mundo estava implodindo.

Em 2018, Khan, ainda lutando para descobrir como limpar seu nome, deu entrada na documentação junto ao programa de reparação do Departamento de Segurança Nacional. Como Munshi, seu amigo, a resposta por escrito enviada em julho daquele ano foi vaga, afirmando que a agência “não pode confirmar nem negar qualquer informação sobre você que possa estar dentro das listas de vigilância federais”. Ele tinha se deparado com um dos limites para os não-cidadãos e não-residentes dos EUA que buscam informações sobre sua possível presença nas listas de vigilância: o governo nem sequer precisa confirmar se ele está na lista de proibição de voar, muito menos o que justifica mantê-lo nela.

“O que é muito frustrante é que eles encontraram uma maneira de tornar sua vida infeliz a milhares de quilômetros de distância 10 anos depois de se encontrar com ele”, disse Ahmad, o advogado da CLEAR. “Deve ser muito óbvio a partir de todas as informações que eles reuniram até aqui que ele não é uma ameaça. Mas ainda assim continuam a mirar nele, e ele tem pouco recurso legal para se defender contra isso”.

Aos poucos, a reputação de Khan foi destruída pelo escrutínio das autoridades americanas, particularmente pelo que ele e seus advogados acreditam ser sua colocação na lista de vigilância para terrorismo. Ele não enfrentou nenhum assédio ou análise por parte do governo paquistanês em seu próprio país, mas, por causa do assédio do governo americano a seus amigos e conhecidos, ele agora vivia sob uma nuvem de suspeitas.

“Amigos de vida inteira começaram a me ignorar com base nesses rumores iniciados por pessoas que tinham sido questionadas na fronteira dos EUA”, disse Khan. “Fiquei deprimido, senti que não tinha saída para isso. Comecei a questionar minha existência e olhei para Deus em busca de ajuda. Senti que, sem nenhuma razão para isso, o FBI simplesmente tirou tudo de mim”.

A questão do dano à reputação surgiu em processos anteriores relacionados ao sistema das listas de vigilância, embora os tribunais tenham mantido a prática até aqui como algo constitucional. Um artigo de junho deste ano na Lawfare, uma publicação sobre legislação de segurança nacional, comentou um caso assim, entendendo que “embora a Suprema Corte tenha reconhecido um interesse de liberdade na reputação de uma pessoa, os danos à reputação devem envolver uma combinação de fatores: uma declaração que estigmatize o requerente perante sua comunidade e que tenha sido divulgada publicamente e, além disso, o governo deve tomar uma ação adicional que tenha alterado ou extinguido os direitos legais do requerente”.

O sigilo das listas de vigilância significa que as informações danosas à reputação sobre os potenciais requerentes — o próprio fato de estarem em uma lista — foram consideradas pelos tribunais como não tendo sido divulgadas publicamente. E, no entanto, o dano à reputação é real. É a ruína de seu nome e de suas amizades que continua a atormentar Khan.

“Aswad havia se formado na faculdade e estava procurando um emprego na época em que isso aconteceu, e isso realmente afetou sua vida pessoal”, disse Ahmad, o advogado da CLEAR. “Perder seus amigos, nem mesmo ser convidado para o casamento de seu melhor amigo — é um dano que você nem consegue quantificar. Isso é algo que as pessoas realmente não compreendem: como o governo pode realmente afetar a vida pessoal das pessoas”.

O sistema da lista de vigilância de terrorismo do governo dos EUA continua obscuro. A revelação de maior impacto até aqui foi um vazamento de 2014, publicado pelo Intercept, sobre seu tamanho e características. As revelações feitas em um processo de 2017 demonstraram que a lista de vigilância havia crescido para incluir 1,2 milhão de pessoas, a grande maioria das quais não eram cidadãos americanos nem residentes permanentes. Ser colocado na lista de vigilância pode ter diferentes efeitos sobre uma pessoa, de impedir que ela viaje a submetê-la a abuso e detenção em países estrangeiros. Khan acredita que sua colocação na lista o arruinou pessoalmente devido a suspeitas de associação com o terrorismo.

“É muito fácil colocar alguém numa lista de vigilância e esquecer. O fato de que isso continua a impactar a vida dessa pessoa não significa nada para eles.”

“Pessoas são colocadas nessas listas e simplesmente são deixadas lá. Não há pressão para retirá-las; na verdade, há pressão para não retirá-las no caso de um dia no futuro elas possivelmente fazerem algo”, disse German, o ex-agente do FBI. “É muito fácil colocar alguém numa lista de vigilância e esquecer. O fato de que isso continua a impactar a vida dessa pessoa não significa nada para eles”.

Khan ainda está no Paquistão. Sua antiga vida de visitas frequentes aos EUA e outros lugares agora é uma lembrança distante. Embora ele gostasse de viajar, ele só deixou o Paquistão uma vez desde seu encontro com o FBI. Ele não tentou voltar aos Estados Unidos desde sua última viagem, por medo do que poderia acontecer quando confrontado pelas autoridades americanas. A experiência de embarcar em um voo internacional e enfrentar a possibilidade de cruzar uma fronteira em qualquer lugar do mundo o deixa ansioso. Sem saber que tipo de rumores foram espalhados sobre ele pelo governo dos EUA com autoridades estrangeiras, muito menos com pessoas em sua própria vida, ele se deixou levar pela depressão e paranoia. Quase uma década após a visita fatídica do FBI naquela manhã, sua vida não voltou ao normal.

Um ano após a cerimônia de casamento de Ahmed na Itália, à qual ele não compareceu, Khan encontrou seu melhor amigo de infância em uma festa em Karachi. Os dois não se falavam nem se viam há quase dois anos. Nesse período, Khan tinha ouvido de outras pessoas que Ahmed dissera a alguns amigos que se sentira pressionado a cortar a amizade entre eles porque “o governo dos EUA está atrás dele”, e que sua ausência no casamento era para proteger os outros convidados das possíveis consequências de estar associado a Khan.

Quando os dois se viram naquela festa, Ahmed o levou para um canto para conversar. Depois de alguns momentos, Ahmed não aguentou e chorou.

“Ele disse que não queria que ficasse nenhum sentimento ruim comigo e que, quando eu tive problemas, ele apenas se assustou. Foi uma conversa difícil para nós”, disse Khan. “Nunca em minha vida eu havia sido machucado do jeito que fui quando ele se afastou de mim sem dizer uma palavra. Mas eu disse a ele que estava tudo bem. É assim que as coisas são”.

“Você acreditou no que eles disseram sobre mim e ficou assustado. Eu entendo. Você pensou que eu era um terrorista”.

Tradução: Maíra Santos

The post Ele rejeitou a oferta do FBI para se tornar um informante. Depois, sua vida foi arruinada. appeared first on The Intercept.

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December 10, 2021

Julian Assange on Brink of Extradition to U.S.

The U.S. government has won its appeal of a British court ruling barring Julian Assange’s extradition on Espionage Act charges, setting the stage for the WikiLeaks founder to be sent to the U.S. to face trial. The decision handed down Friday morning reverses a previous conclusion that Assange would face unacceptable risks to his safety if held in the United States. A lower-court judge ruled in January that Assange would be at risk of suicide or other harm if held in American custody. But following reassurances by U.S. authorities that he would be held in the most strict confinement, a judge found that Assange can be extradited on the charges related to his publishing of classified State Department documents.

Assange can still appeal the verdict, but the judgment by the court puts him at greater risk than ever of finding himself standing trial on charges that have alarmed press freedom advocates. In a statement given after the ruling, Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris said that the ruling was “dangerous and misguided” and that U.S. assurances about the conditions of Assange’s confinement once stateside could not be considered reliable. Doctors have testified that Assange suffers from severe depression and other mental illnesses triggered by the years he has spent on the run from the U.S. government, and that he would be at grave risk of suicide if extradited to the U.S. The U.S. government has said that it might allow Assange to serve any future sentence in Australia, where he would face less restrictive confinement, but these assurances have been criticized by his supporters as vague and unreliable.

The Biden administration has continued to press ahead with Assange’s indictment over his alleged role in assisting whistleblower Chelsea Manning to release thousands of State Department cables and other classified information in 2010 and 2011. The classified disclosures included thousands of documents outlining U.S. perceptions of foreign regimes and helped trigger major unrest in countries like Tunisia, where the 2011 revolution was spurred in part by revelations of domestic corruption outlined in the documents. WikiLeaks also helped uncover evidence of civilian killings carried out by U.S. troops during the war in Iraq, including shocking video footage of the crew of an Apache helicopter killing Reuters journalists and others during a 2007 attack in Baghdad.

In later years, Assange became a controversial figure in U.S. domestic politics due to his perceived support of Donald Trump and allegations that later WikiLeaks disclosures were aimed at helping ensure his victory in the 2016 election. But the Espionage Act charges he now faces stem from Manning’s classified disclosures, which provided a rich resource for journalists and activists around the world. The potential criminalization of a standard journalistic practice — the publication of classified documents provided by a source — has alarmed press freedom advocates.

“That United States prosecutors continued to push for this outcome is a betrayal of the journalistic principles the Biden administration has taken credit for celebrating,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement decrying Friday’s verdict. “As brave whistleblowers have explained for decades, this kind of abuse of the Espionage Act against sources — and now journalists and publishers — is an embarrassment to basic ideals of justice and to core First Amendment values.”

The change from the Trump to Biden administration does not seem to have engendered any greater concern for the possible implications of Assange’s prosecution for acts of journalism. Assange’s fate remains unsettled, as his supporters, many of whom gathered in protest outside of the court following the verdict, have already indicated that he plans to appeal the decision. But the Biden administration appears set on continuing the persecution of Assange that has gone on for roughly a decade.

“Julian’s life is once more under grave threat, and so is the right of journalists to publish material that governments and corporations find inconvenient,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said. “This is about the right of a free press to publish without being threatened by a bullying superpower.”

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December 9, 2021

Israel Killed Up to 192 Palestinian Civilians in May 2021 Attacks on Gaza

A new report by the independent monitoring group Airwars found that the 2021 conflict between Israel and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip killed up to 192 Palestinian civilians and injured hundreds more over 11 days of intense fighting. Rockets fired by Palestinian militants into Israel are also estimated to have killed 10 civilians inside Israel during the brief but intense conflict first triggered by tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem.

Among the key findings of the report — titled “Why Did They Bomb Us?” — are the age breakdowns of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza. Of the total number of civilian deaths, roughly one-third were children, most of whom were killed in attacks that killed or wounded multiple members of the same family. More than 70 percent of the reported attacks that killed civilians had no corresponding reports of militants hit alongside them, meaning that civilians were the only victims.

One attack documented in the report took place on the night of May 15, when an Israeli airstrike hit a house in the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza. Two mothers, sisters-in-law, were reportedly killed in the attack, along with eight children between the ages of 5 and 14. One 5-month-old boy was found by rescuers in the rubble from the attack still alive in his dead mother’s arms. The families had gathered together to celebrate the long weekend after the Eid holiday.

Alaa Abu Hattab, whose wife, children, sister, and sister’s children were all killed in the attack, recounted to Airwars what took place.

“I left my house on foot at about 1:30AM to go to some of the local shops that were open late during the run-up to Eid to buy toys and snacks for the kids for the Eid festival and to buy some food, as we were hungry,” Abu Hattab said in the report. Fifteen minutes later, an explosion hit the area he had just left. He ran back to find that it was his own home that had been struck. Seeing the rubble where his family house once stood, he fainted in shock. “When I regained consciousness, I saw rescue workers looking for bodies under the rubble and recovering body parts. The attack had shredded the bodies. Other parts remained under the rubble because they could not find them.”

No militants were reported killed in the strike, one of many that hit the strip during the brief fighting. “There were no militants in or near my house and no rockets or rocket launchers there,” Abu Hattab told Airwars. “I still don’t know why they bombed my house and killed my wife and children and my sister and her children.”

Farah Al-Bahtiti, 5, shows the physical scars six months after surviving a bombing during the 11 days of fighting in May, in her home in Gaza City on December 4, 2021.

Photo: Fatima Shbair/Getty Images

In addition to providing details on the civilian impact of the last war in Gaza, the Airwars report also provides the first comprehensive review of the long-running Israeli air campaign in Syria. Civilian casualties in Israel’s air campaign in Syria, mostly targeting alleged Iranian and Hezbollah assets, have been light, particularly in comparison with U.S., Russian, and Syrian government aerial attacks there that have killed tens of thousands of people. An estimated 14 to 40 civilians have been killed across hundreds of Israeli strikes against air bases, troop convoys, and weapons stores since 2013, according to Airwars findings.

“I still don’t know why they bombed my house and killed my wife and children and my sister and her children.”

The relative precision of Israel’s attacks in Syria stands in stark contrast to the toll of its operations in Gaza. According to the report, more civilians were killed in Gaza during the fighting this summer than in all of the attacks that have been carried out in Syria over the past eight years. The staggering difference between civilian harm in the two campaigns raises “fundamental questions about targeting policies,” according to the report. Israeli strikes in Syria have largely taken place away from built-up civilian areas, whereas the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet — making the nature of the Israeli campaign there something closer to counterinsurgency carried out from the skies.

In response to questions about its targeting practices during the 11-day Gaza conflict, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson told Airwars that “terror organizations in the Gaza Strip deliberately embed their military assets in densely populated civilian areas,” adding that the IDF conducted internal operational reviews of its strikes and that the findings from those reports were classified. In response to similar questions about its attacks on Israel, a Hamas spokesperson stated that “[Israeli] military compounds and security facilities are built inside big cities and near universities and near hospitals,” claiming that the group similarly issued warnings in the hours before it carried out its attacks and took steps to ensure that its operations complied with international law.

The Airwars report is only the latest in a series from the monitoring organization on the civilian toll of various air campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa, including the U.S.-led coalition war against the Islamic State, Russian and Turkish airstrikes in Syria, and international operations in Libya. The study on Israeli and Palestinian militant activity is the first of its kind from the group.

“Our latest study corroborates what we have found with other large-scale conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere: Even technologically advanced militaries kill large numbers of civilians when attacks focus on urban centers,” Airwars Director Chris Woods said about the report. “Stark differences in civilian deaths and injuries from Israeli actions in Syria and in the Gaza Strip clearly illustrate that the most significant driver of civilian harm remains the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The single most effective way to reduce the number of civilians dying in warfare would be to restrict the use of such dangerous wide-area effect weapons.”

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December 7, 2021

The Iran War That Obama Tried to Avoid Is Now Around the Corner

A woman walks past a mural of the Iranian national flag in central Tehran, Iran, on Nov. 7, 2019.

Photo: STR/AFP via Getty Images

The United States is going to war with Iran.

That conclusion seems unavoidable watching President Joe Biden fail to revive the Iran nuclear deal from which the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew in 2018. The Iranian side has demanded the removal of sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump, as well as a guarantee that a future U.S. administration will not once again abruptly pull out of the nuclear deal, which is known as the JCPOA. While Iran has continued to abide by the minimum terms of the deal in order to preserve the possibility of bringing it back to life, Biden’s unwillingness or inability to meet its terms has left observers now warning of a “worst-case” scenario in which Iran proceeds to weaponize its nuclear program and the two countries come to a full-blown armed conflict.

It is worth reflecting on how both sides came to this point. The nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration was a means of averting war by placing Iran’s nuclear program under international monitoring in exchange for economic integration with the West. That agreement was abruptly torn up by Trump, seemingly in a fit of personal pique at President Barack Obama, with the encouragement of hawkish advisers and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In place of a diplomatic arrangement, the Trump administration waged a campaign of economic pressure, sabotage, and assassinations targeting Iranian leadership.

Those efforts did great harm to innocent Iranians as well as to U.S. diplomatic standing. They have not done what the diplomatic agreement did: actually curb Iran’s nuclear program. Iran today remains under U.S. sanctions that have severely harmed its economy and sent its people into desperation. Its nuclear program, however, has c ontinued to advance. The Biden administration’s failure or incapacity to do the minimum of reversing Trump’s economic sanctions has likely put an end to the old agreement. Absent the 2015 nuclear deal, the only two options left on the table are the international community accepting an Iran with nuclear weapons capability or going to war to stop it.

The truly depressing thing is that even if Biden wasn’t dragging his feet, it is unclear whether the original deal was even revivable after Trump showed that the U.S. could turn against it without notice. Western companies that had expressed an interest in investing in the Iranian market when the deal was first negotiated have been scared off, likely for good. “Even if the JCPOA was restored, no Western company would dare invest a cent in Iran, no Western bank would finance any deal in Iran with the threat of the return of US sanctions in 2025. Once was enough. The Iranians know it,” former French diplomat Gérard Araud observed in a tweet.

In addition to its unwillingness to lift the Trump-era sanctions and its inability to make executive promises that bind future administrations, the Biden administration probably lacks the majority votes it would need in the U.S. Senate to ratify the deal as a treaty. That means the odds of another rug-pulling in 2025 are high if a Republican administration comes to office. Absent the ability to guarantee the not-unreasonable demand that a signed deal be adhered to, the U.S. faces the prospect of being structurally unable to carry out the type of complex diplomacy necessary to avert war or nuclear proliferation.

Regional powers are already sending strong signals that they are preparing for a major conflict over the issue.

In recent days, top-ranking Israeli military officials have visited the headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command for meetings said to be about the deteriorating situation with Iran. The Israeli defense establishment has been divided in its views on the Iranian nuclear issue, with some officials contradicting the position held by Netanyahu that the deal is an unacceptable threat to Israeli security. But even Israeli officials who have said that Iran is not close to making a bomb have begun to signal that airstrikes are now on the table, particularly as it appears that the nuclear program may soon be freed of the oversight imposed by the original deal. In addition to discussing strikes against nuclear targets in Iran, Israeli news reports this week have claimed that officials are even pushing their U.S. counterparts to carry out strikes against Iranian targets elsewhere in the Middle East.

In the big picture, Iran is not completely free of blame for this predicament. Its decision to make Israel its primary villain in its public rhetoric despite the absence of any concrete territorial dispute between the two countries has mired it in a serious conflict that it may otherwise have avoided. But the fact remains that the 2015 nuclear deal, which Iranian diplomats at the time characterized as a first step toward broader conversations on areas of disagreement with the U.S., was being upheld on their side at the moment that Trump decided to tear it up and that the Biden administration has failed to reverse the steps that Trump took. The response to the question “What now?” has no easy or comforting answers.

The sclerotic nature of foreign policy debate means that if and when a major war with Iran comes, including airstrikes, naval conflict, and possible ground operations involving U.S. troops, most Americans will have forgotten the precipitating events that brought the two countries to this point, as well as the people responsible for destroying a diplomatic agreement intended to prevent bloodshed. After 20 years of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, Americans are clearly fatigued and eager to avoid new wars in the region. Despite how tired they may be of confrontation, their leaders seem bent on having one more — perhaps the biggest of all.

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Author: Murtaza Hussain

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