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Category: Afghanistan

  • Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out

    The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.

    As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.

    European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.

    Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.

    The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.

    Power projection

    In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.

    The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.

    But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.

    The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.

    That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.

    The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.

    They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.

    The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.

    Brutal policies

    After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.

    The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.

    The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.

    States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.

    Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.

    Climate crisis

    The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.

    But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.

    Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.

    In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.

    Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.

    The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.

    Impregnable borders

    Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.

    They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.

    Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.

    Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.

    Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”

    But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles

    P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.

    P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.

    Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.

    Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The countries with the lowest vaccination rates – currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world, reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen, such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15 December 2021, at its current rate of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.

    In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, said that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then. In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr Ayoade Alakija said of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding [vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it, ‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as much as in Washington DC’.

    Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.

    Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.

    Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid, one of the four apartheids of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by 89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?

    A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself, then at least in the binding United Nations Charter (1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.

    Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.

    Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.

    Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth highlighting:

    1. The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly 100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over the past eight years. Our first study in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, details how this remarkable feat was achieved.
    2. Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour victory in many years. Our June dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, catalogued the struggle over land in India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
    3. Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries that run from 1973 (Chile) to 2009 (Honduras) to 2019 (Bolivia). A year ago, our January dossier, Twilight, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process through hybrid wars is a sign of great possibility for people in the American hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, is a good place to read up on the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
    4. A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the increasing military presence of the United States and France found expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso. When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo (age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David against the French Goliath’, wrote Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, was co-published with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the Western military presence on the continent.
    5. We have seen strikes by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock. But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their dignity. Our March dossier, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens a window into their struggles.
    Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in K abul market, 1953.

    Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in Kabul market, 1953.

    Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with starvation. The United States has prevented Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of foreign aid, which accounted for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme calculates that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.

    This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property. Gender inequality shapes these numbers, since women received barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and nationality.

    In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his elegies, Arash-e Kamangir (‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder about possibilities:

    I told you life is beautiful.
    Told and untold, there is a lot here.
    The clear sky;
    The golden sun;
    The flower gardens;
    The boundless plains;

    The flowers peeping up through the snow;
    The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
    The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
    The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
    To come, to go, to run;
    To love;
    To lament for humankind;
    And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.

    The post We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media Forget Afghan Plight As US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk

    Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks. For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen.

    The post Media Forget Afghan Plight As US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Year in, Biden Hasn’t Fulfilled Promise to Repair Refugee Resettlement Program

    A migrant man holds a baby at the Rio Grande near the Del Rio Port of Entry in Del Rio, Texas, on September 18, 2021.

    On June 20, 2020, World Refugee Day, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden made his most sweeping statement to date on how his administration would differ from his predecessor’s on the rights of migrants. Gone would be the “xenophobia and racism” that were “the unabashed tenets of Trump’s refugee and immigration policy.” Biden pledged to increase the cap on refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000 in his first year in office, and to restore “America’s historic role as leader in resettlement and defending the rights of refugees everywhere.”

    His first year did not go as promised.

    In the fiscal year ending in October 2021, the United States only resettled 11,411 refugees through regular channels. That’s 400 fewer than the previous fiscal year — which itself saw historically low resettlement — and far short of the 62,500 that Biden eventually ordered to be allowed to resettle in the United States in his first year in office. The U.S. has only released data for the first month of the new fiscal year, which shows 401 refugees have been resettled. Biden did finally raise the cap to 125,000, which, if met by the end of September 2022, would represent a massive turnaround not just over previous years, but of the last two decades: The last time the U.S. resettled more than 100,000 refugees was in 1994.

    An additional 40,000 Afghans were temporarily allowed into the United States under a program called humanitarian parole, though they have not been issued green cards, and in most cases, their status expires in a year or two. Roughly 30,000 Afghans still housed on military bases are waiting to be allowed into the United States.

    Sunil Varghese, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Program, told Truthout that Biden’s low numbers have a lot to do with Donald Trump’s successful dismantling of the resettlement infrastructure, but plenty of blame rests with the current administration as well. Biden’s “rhetoric of a human rights-centric approach to migration and foreign policy may not be an overarching, guiding principle, but one of many competing considerations,” Varghese said.

    Other refugee advocates echo the degree to which Trump dismantled the refugee screening and support apparatuses. “The process of facilitating the resettlement of displaced persons into the U.S. is not like a light switch that can be turned on and off,” said Danielle Grigsby, director of external affairs at the Community Sponsorship Hub, which connects refugees with local sponsors and advocates. “The damage inflicted on the resettlement infrastructure will take significant time to repair.”

    Biden’s immigration, asylum and refugee policies in general have been a decidedly mixed bag. His administration has followed through on some long-held progressive priorities, but many others have fallen to the side. In mid-December, the administration ended the longstanding U.S. policy of holding immigrant families in prison-like detention centers, according to Axios. “This is truly a good development, even though the treatment of migrant families writ large continues to be poor,” American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in response to the news. Families can still be subject to confusing and arbitrary seeming court hearings and procedures, and many face significant economic hardships.

    Even this development is tempered, as the Department of Homeland Security will continue to rely at least partially on using GPS-enabled ankle bracelets to surveil migrants. Advocates have long criticized the use of bracelets, saying they lead to stigma and are unnecessary to compel migrants to appear in court.

    In other areas, the Biden administration is acting with near-total continuity to Trump. Biden continues to invoke a 1944 public health act called Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away asylum seekers without providing them an opportunity to make their case before a judge. Trump used the pandemic as an excuse to implement the rule, which many saw as a flimsy pretext to pursue his openly bigoted policies at the southern border. Biden has also reimplemented Trump’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denies asylum seekers the right to live in the United States while their case is pending. Legal scholars say this practice is illegal and in violation of U.S. treaty obligation and international law.

    “It took a couple years for the Trump administration to figure out the nuances of the various immigration programs,” Varghese said. By the time Trump left office, though, he and his team had been very successful in jamming up almost every refugee and asylum assistance program in the executive branch. He and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, took an “all of the above” approach to limiting refugees and immigrants into the country. “That could be changing internal policies, it could be writing new regulations, it could be creating new policies and bureaucracies,” Varghese continued. “It could be by bankrupting [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services], it could be closing offices.”

    The plight of refugees is no longer in the corporate headlines, but in 2016, the subject was a major political issue. Then-candidate Donald Trump demonized refugees and asylum seekers constantly, especially Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war. Following his lead, nearly every other Republican candidate promised restricted refugee resettlement to the United States.

    Trump and Miller attempted to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the country in the administration’s first week in office. After initially striking the policy down, the Supreme Court ultimately gave the ban its blessing once North Korea and Venezuela were added. The outrage over the “Muslim ban” was perhaps only matched by the administration’s family separation policy at the southern border.

    For all the criticism Trump deserves for dismantling the existing refugee apparatus, the Biden administration has not made rebuilding it a top priority, despite early promising signs. In February 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14013, which called for the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program to be “rebuilt and expanded, commensurate with global need.” The order also revoked the discriminatory restrictions Trump had imposed, and called for additional reporting from the responsible executive agencies to determine what other changes could be made to address the refugee backlog.

    Then, somewhat inexplicably to outside observers, in April, Biden refused to raise the resettlement cap from Trump’s historically low 15,000. He reversed course two weeks later, bowing to pressure from progressives and refugee advocates. His administration’s new policy to resettle 125,000 refugees by September signals, on paper at least, a renewed commitment to expanding the assistance program. Whether the executive branch will actually devote the resources, time and political efforts to achieve those goals remains to be seen.

    The issue of refugee resettlement in the United States, and migrant humanitarian concerns throughout Europe and the rest of the world, will likely become more pressing with every year. The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, along with continuing conflicts throughout the Middle East and Africa, all but ensure migration levels will stay at near-record highs for the foreseeable future.

    Deeply intertwined with migration from conflict zones is migration driven by climate change. The United Nations predicts that 200 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 due to rising temperatures, drought, flooding, extreme weather and conflict over resources.

    The treatment of refugees has largely taken a backseat to other liberal priorities under Biden. The administration has prioritized its COVID response and push for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, two of Biden’s few major legislative accomplishments to date, all while trying to balance demands for increased attention to voting rights, gun control, health care costs, and other headline issues. The record-low number of refugees admitted barely made a blip in the mainstream media ecosystem. The State Department refused to comment on the record.

    Varghese and other refugee advocates would like to see Biden take a holistic approach to migrant rights and assistance, and to redouble his administration’s efforts. “What we’ve seen is basically a political calculation” from Biden to treat refugee issues as “just one factor among many,” Varghese said. “The Trump administration was so singularly focused on paring down humanitarian immigration programs” that Biden’s measured approach “is not enough to combat four years of a whole-of-government approach to tear down refugee resettlement.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No USA Christmas Love for Afghans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, and North Koreans

    This Christmas season, as always, CIA controlled mainstream media is filled with unctuous images of the hungry homeless in America being charitably served food by private citizens and institutions. It has long become an American tradition of kindness during the season celebrating the birth of all loving Jesus along with gift giving Santa Claus, and along with the encouragement and participation of churches, this tradition often receives government support.

    The Christmas time Christian tradition of charitable feeding of the hungry homeless in capitalist USA never extends to include those millions of men, women and children made hungry by heartless US sanctions on countries overseas. The hard-hearted Deep State investors in war of the Military Industrial Complex would never allow any of its captive US presidents to be gracious to the hungry in sanctioned nations at Christmas time.

    It does no good for those suffering US sanctions to protest even if suffering starvation that always threatens death for their children first, but protests still go on.

    “Let Us Eat”: Kabul Protesters Demand Release of Frozen Afghan Assets

    CommonDreams reports protests three days before Christmas eve, December 21, 2021.

    Hundreds of protesters marched through the streets of Kabul toward the shuttered U.S. Embassy on Tuesday, urging the release of Afghanistan’s frozen assets.

    Holding banners reading, “Let us eat” and “Give us our frozen money,” the protesters chanted slogans and marched down a central avenue, with the ruling Taliban providing security. International funding to Afghanistan has been suspended and billions of dollars of the country’s assets abroad, mostly in the U.S., were frozen once the Taliban took control.

    The Taliban is again governing all of Afghanistan as it was when the US invaded 20 years ago on the pretext of needing to find Osama bin Laden, who the CIA had welcomed into Afghanistan years before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

    In 1979 President Carter had had the CIA fund, arm and train war lord terrorists to overthrow a popular women-liberating Socialist Kabul government. This brought about a civil war which brought in Soviet Military to aid the beleaguered Kabul government. This was followed by a second even more destructive civil war between US heavily armed war lords causing mayhem and chaos, in which rape was common. In 1992, Kabul came to be a bullet riddled city, a center of lawlessness, crime and atrocities fueled by complex tribal rivalries. This gave birth to the Taliban (‘student’ in Dali language) who defeated the war lords and stopped the raping, instituted strict Islamic dress code, and limited the movement and schooling of women. Though Taliban now promises education for women through university and a relaxed dress code, President Biden sanctimoniously cites Taliban prohibiting women’s education as reason not to release Afghanistan’s bank deposits desperately needed to buy food and medicine.

    US Sanctions Against Venezuela Rob People of Basic Human Rights: UN Expert’s Report

    The United Nations has protested for Venezuelans against US seizure of Venezuelan bank deposits and sanctions blocking the sale of its oil and imports of almost everything, even medicines and food.

    According to the report, unilateral sanctions against Venezuela are politically motivated and violate international law.

    The Guardian writes of UN finding that one-third of Venezuelans are underfed.

    One of every three people in Venezuela is struggling to put enough food on the table to meet minimum nutrition requirements as the nation’s severe economic contraction and political upheaval persists, according to a new study by the UN World Food Program….

    According to the UN Rapporteur sent to Venezuela on their behalf to compile a UN Human Rights Council Report in 2017 and 2018 the United States has used the illegal sanctions and financial blockade against Venezuela to create a humanitarian crisis and are therefore is criminally liable for the increased deaths of children and the infirm being denied vital medical supplies directly because of the sanctions.

    His damning report stated categorically that the US sanctions kill and therefore America should face prosecution at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity….

    In November 2017 one US bank blocked the transfer of funds to pay for 300,000 doses of insulin. Another retained $1.65 billion Venezuela had paid for the purchase of food and medicine. Another blocked the transfer of over $9 billion profits generated by the US subsidiary of the publicly owned Venezuelan oil company. In May last year, Wells Fargo bank in America cancelled a payment of $7.5 million from Brazil to Venezuela for the supply of electricity and also blocked a $7 million purchase of dialysis supplies for patients in Venezuela, including thousands of children.

    UN General Assembly calls for US to end Cuba embargo for 29th consecutive year

    A total of 184 countries on Wednesday voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel voting against.

    Sanctions have made it harder for Cuba to acquire the medical equipment needed to develop COVID-19 vaccines as well as equipment for food production.

    US Blockade on Cuba is a Crime against Humanity says the Havana Times.

    From Cuba’s draft resolution, “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” before the UN General Assembly:

    The blockade continues to be a massive and flagrant violation of the Cuban people’s human rights and qualifies as an act of genocide according to the 1948 Convention Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

    Over the period since the last report the blockade has caused Cuba losses worth 4.305 billion dollars.

    The human rights of all Cuban people are being — and have been for nearly 60 years — assaulted. This is a crime against humanity.

    The US admits they are to blame for the Syrian hunger

    The Syrians see the increasing sanctions as economic-warfare after the US failure to bring about ‘regime change’ by using terrorists supported by the CIA. Damascus declares the sanctions violate human rights and international law as they affect the Syrian population.

    Human Rights and US Sanction Against Iran

    Over-compliance with United States-imposed sanctions against Iran is harming the right to health, and people with a rare skin disease are among those affected, many of them children, experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Tuesday.

    These patients suffer from epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a severe and life-threatening skin condition, which causes extremely painful wounds. Many are children, who are often referred to as “butterfly kids” because of their fragile skin.

    A Swedish company which makes the bandages that reportedly are the most effective treatment for their condition, has decided to halt shipments to Iran due to fear of secondary sanctions as part of over-compliance.

    The experts explained that many banks and businesses worldwide, including pharmaceutical and medical companies, over-comply to avoid risk of any potential penalties.

    “They refuse to finance exempted trade or to conduct the corresponding transactions with sanctioned countries. This has prevented the Iranian business partner of that Swedish company from being able to import the bandages, even though medical and other humanitarian goods were announced to be exempt from the sanctions,” they said in a statement.

    The Humanitarian Impact of Sanction on the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea

    Women Mobilizing to End the War – Korea Peace Now! write,

    In direct contravention of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, sanctions punish North Korean civilians for the actions of their government. Here’s how sanctions harm ordinary North Koreans:

    Sanctions hinder urgently needed humanitarian aid and could result in devastating long-term effects.

    • According to a 2018 UNICEF report, 200,000 North Korean children already suffer from acute malnutrition, and sanctions put 60,000 of these vulnerable children at risk of starvation due to the disruption in the availability of humanitarian supplies caused by tightening sanctions.
    • Unilateral US sanctions delay or outright block vital humanitarian shipments to the North Korean people. One NGO recently reported that it took them over a year and a half to ship 16 boxes of beans to the DPRK.
    • Sanctions passed in 2017 prohibit the transport of any metal goods, significantly hampering the shipment of basic medical supplies. A shipment of reproductive health kits was subjected to significant delay because it contained aluminum steam sterilizers —the most important part of the kit.

    Sanctions target North Korea’s civilian economy and harm the most vulnerable members of its population.

    • Current sanctions have the greatest impact not on the power elites who are the intended targets, but on the most vulnerable North Koreans: working-class families, particularly children and seniors living in remote areas with restricted access to medical supplies, food, and fuel for cooking and heating.

    Sanctions do not convey the Christmas spirit!

    The post No USA Christmas Love for Afghans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, and North Koreans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The military: the year in review – war crimes, withdrawals and secrecy

    2021 was a year of decline and reorganisation for the British military. It was also a year when historical war crimes allegations resurfaced, secrecy was expanded and a major defeat became undeniable. We decided to look back over some of the key themes in military affairs which emerged over the year.

    This article is another in The Year In Review series. You’ll be able to catch up on the many of the other review articles here.

    Cut and run

    The Afghanistan occupation finally ground to an end as the Taliban took Kabul in August. Bringing to an end 20 years of military occupation. While generals maintained the military had never been defeated, the rapid and messy withdrawal told another story. The narrative around the chaos of the pull-out was being revised even as it happened. Mainstream media focus was on ‘human interest’ – namely via images of soldiers carrying children and a bizarre story about an evacuation of dogs.

    The defeat caused major dissonance, with the guilty nations arguing about who was to blame for failure. And one Tory MP even arguing that Afghanistan should be reinvaded. The government was less keen, however, on a proper inquiry into the disaster.

    War crimes

    Yet the real face of British military operations did peek through. Allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, this time by SAS troops, re-surfaced again. The allegations included that in 2011 special forces troops murdered 17 people over a two day period during house raids in Afghanistan. And that key documents relating to the cases were kept hidden by the military. One senior officer was quoted as saying of the alleged killings:

     I find it depressing it has come to this. Ultimately a massive failure of leadership.

    Ireland

    And Britain’s violent history in Ireland also reared its head. Former soldier Dennis Hutchings died while on trial for the Troubles-era killing of John Pat Cunningham, a disabled man from Country Tyrone. At the last minute, the military u-turned under pressure from veterans groups and former Tory minister Johnny Mercer on Hutchings’s funeral. They allowed him to be buried with military honours on Remembrance Day.

    And it looks as if the British establishment is attempting to rewrite the British military’s record in Ireland. In November, a Tory MP announced that the Ireland occupation would also be given an official history. The aim: to provide an official version of the conflict which favoured the British.

    Accountable?

    2021 also saw military secrecy deepened. Parts of the military were reorganised into new ‘Ranger’ regiments in November. Meaning that over 1,000 troops will now be protected from Freedom of Information requests and parliamentary questions. The Canary was ahead of the game on this, first warning of the threat to accountability in March 2021.

    Military chief general Nick Carter tastefully chose Remembrance to announce that the UK needed an army of killer robots. Clearly, another step away from accountability and towards less accountable military operations. And November also saw a new head of the military, admiral Tony Radakin, lay out his dystopian vision of future warfare. Central to his strategy: more deployments and deeper integration between the military and arms firms.

    Overseas Operations Bill

    Another major story in 2021 was the Overseas Operations Bill. The Bill aimed to stop investigations into alleged crimes by UK troops. As The Canary reported critics included everyone from the Quakers to the Royal British Legion.

    While top military lawyer Hilary Meredith warned that, far from protecting troops, the bill would strip personnel of their ability to hold the MOD to account:

    It is totally unacceptable for the Government to legislate to deny those who put their lives on the line for our country overseas the same employer liability rights as the UK civilians they defend. The section must be scrapped – it clearly breaches the Armed Forces Covenant.

    However, due to the large Tory majority the bill passed despite substantial criticism from outside parliament in April 2021.

    Fightback

    However, the military and warmongers didn’t get it all their own way. A special statue of a soldier went up in Margate to highlight the disaster of British foreign policy. The Tories were roundly mocked for trying to hide, well, everything behind the Union Jack. And over the pond, ex-US president George W Bush found one of his public events had been penetrated by an angry Iraq war veteran who demanded he account for his crimes.

    In 2022, the fight against war and militarism will continue. And The Canary will be there to report on it.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Cpl Rebecca Brown.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Media Forget Afghan Plight as US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk 

     

    As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).

    Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to US sanctions, where is the outrage?

    UN: Afghanistan on ‘countdown to catastrophe’ without urgent humanitarian relief

    UN News (10/25/21) quoted the head of the World Food Programme: “Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises – if not the worst – and food security has all but collapsed.”

    Experts warned of an impending humanitarian crisis in the wake of the US withdrawal (IRC, 8/20/21). In recent months, the messages have become more urgent. A UN report (10/25/21) warned that “combined shocks of drought, conflict, Covid-19 and an economic crisis in Afghanistan have left more than half the population facing a record level of acute hunger.” One million children are so malnourished they are at risk of dying in the coming months (IRC, 12/3/21).

    Decades of conflict, invasion and occupation left Afghanistan with a highly precarious economy. In 2019, well before withdrawal, a record 50% of Afghans reported finding it “very difficult” to get by on their household income (Gallup, 9/23/21). While drought and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to the current humanitarian crisis, it is largely driven by the imploding economy. The entire banking system is collapsing, with government employees going unpaid, and citizens unable to access their money or receive funds from relatives abroad.

    As many have pointed out, the Taliban shoulder some blame, having banned women from most paid jobs outside of teaching and healthcare, costing the economy up to 5% of its GDP (UNDP, 12/1/21). But a much bigger driver of the crisis has been the US-led sanctions on the Taliban. The US occupation left Afghanistan dependent on aid for 40% of its GDP and 80% of its budget. After withdrawal, the US froze some $9 billion of the country’s central bank reserves, and US and UN sanctions cut off the central bank from the international banking system and drastically limited the aid flowing into the country (UNDP, 12/2/21).

    Despite pleas from around the globe, even, most recently, from former US military commanders in Afghanistan and dozens of members of Congress (Washington Post, 12/20/21), the Biden administration has made only slight tweaks to its policies, which are ostensibly meant to punish and provide leverage over the Taliban, but, like other supposedly targeted sanctions, have the effect of putting millions of civilian lives in peril.

    Vanishing interest

    Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks.

    For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen.

    Even when reports did mention the crisis, they rarely highlighted the US role. Of the 37 mentions, FAIR was able to find only four that named sanctions as a factor.

    MSNBC twice (11/23/21, 12/16/21) brought on spokespeople from the International Rescue Committee to discuss the crisis, and CBS did so once (12/12/21); all three of these guests named the role sanctions play in Afghanistan’s economic collapse.

    ABC: Country in Crisis

    “One Million Children at Risk of Dying of Starvation” was the secondary point of ABC‘s report (12/15/21); the main focus of the story was “Taliban Authority Being Challenged by ISIS Terrorists.”

    ABC World News Tonight‘s Ian Pannell (12/15/21), in a report from Afghanistan, made the only other mention of sanctions, in a vague and brief reference that named no names: “A mix of sanctions and drought has brought the country to the brink of catastrophe.” After showing an emaciated two-year-old and telling the child’s mother, “You must feel very hopeless, very helpless,” Pannell wrapped up his report by noting:

    $280 million in emergency aid has been OKed by the United States and others, but it’s likely not enough. It won’t reach hungry mouths until the end of the year. And the situation right now in Afghanistan seems as bad as I can remember it in 20 years of reporting here.

    With no mention of what was causing the crisis, or what kind of help was actually needed, Pannell’s report had the effect of painting the US as a benevolent actor that just wasn’t doing quite enough to address a largely inevitable situation. The segment and its top-of-the-show preview were the only two mentions FAIR’s study found of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis on ABC during the study period.

    More often, the crisis was covered with a brief soundbite that emphasized women’s rights over the broader humanitarian crisis, as on CNN Newsroom (11/28/21):

    A group of female Afghan students graduated from a private university in Kandahar on Saturday. They were forced to wear veils, due to a rule imposed by the Taliban. Before the Taliban takeover, an estimated 100,000 girls were attending universities. The graduates fear finding jobs might be difficult, because of both the Taliban rule and the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis.

    Finding jobs is also difficult when a powerful enemy has frozen the funds of your nation’s central bank—but that’s not the kind of problem US corporate media is likely to dwell on.

    The post Media Forget Afghan Plight as US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk  appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Warning of ‘humanitarian collapse,’ dozens of House Democrats urge Biden to unfreeze Afghan funds

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 20, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Warning that the US freeze on Afghanistan’s central bank reserves and sanctions risk deadly “economic pain and humanitarian collapse,” 46 House Democrats on Monday implored President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to “urgently” lift financial restrictions on the Taliban-ruled nation.

    “Mark my words: If this is not done, you will have Afghans fleeing en masse on foot—they’re already doing it—carrying their babies in one hand and their belongings in the other.”

    Shah Mehrabi, Professor of Economics at Montgomery College, Maryland, and senior member Afghanistan’s central bank board

    While expressing gratitude for the administration’s efforts to end the longest war in US history and evacuate tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, the lawmakers’ letter—which is led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), and Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL)—recommends “conscientiously but urgently modifying current US policy regarding the freeze of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and ongoing sanctions” in order to “avoid harsh economic measures that will directly harm Afghan families and children.”

    “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in 20 years of war,” the lawmakers caution.

    “United Nations officials are warning that millions of Afghans could run out of food before winter, with one million children at risk of starvation,” they note. “World Food Program surveys indicate that 95% of Afghan households are not consuming enough food. Afghanistan will face ‘universal poverty by the middle of next year,’ with the poverty rate expected to rise from 72% to as high as 98%. Afghanistan’s economic pain and humanitarian collapse both threaten to trigger a new refugee crisis throughout the region.”

    The letter continues:

    For these reasons, we are deeply concerned by the continued U.S. freeze of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s choice to deny Afghanistan access to special reserve assets intended to help developing countries alleviate the impact of the pandemic, and U.S. sanctions’ impacts on Afghanistan. The U.S. confiscation of $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s currency reserves held in the United States is contributing to soaring inflation and the shuttering of commercial banks and vital private businesses, plunging the country—which relies overwhelmingly on imports that require hard currency—deeper into economic and humanitarian crisis.

    The lawmakers recommend “providing Afghanistan’s central bank access to hard currency reserves,” as well as working with the IMF to “allow access to the emergency financing that was recently allocated” for the country.

    Additionally, the lawmakers warn that “failure to maintain open communication not only risks humanitarian devastation but also directly threatens U.S. national security interests.”

    “An economic collapse could result in the Taliban’s retrenchment from U.S. engagement and cooperation on counterterrorism, create ungoverned spaces, and enable resentment against the U.S.,” they write, “producing fertile ground for groups like ISIS to gain strength and use the territory as a staging ground for plots against the U.S. and its allies.”

    Advocacy groups have described the Biden administration’s policy as a form of collective punishment.

    Advocacy groups have described the Biden administration’s policy as a form of collective punishment.

    Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland and a senior member Afghanistan’s central bank board for nearly 20 years, told The Washington Post that “if these funds are not released, what is going to happen is the central bank will not be able to perform its main functions, and the impact on the economy overall will be devastating.”

    “Mark my words: If this is not done, you will have Afghans fleeing en masse on foot—they’re already doing it—carrying their babies in one hand and their belongings in the other,” he added. “And soon Europe will have a massive refugee crisis on its hands.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge

    It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.

    His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    These two western countries killed non-combatants and carried out torture not, as they claimed, in the pursuit of self-defence or in the promotion of democracy, but to impose control over a strategic, resource-rich region.

    It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want to keep concealed. By redefining his journalism as “espionage” – the basis for the US extradition claim – they are determined to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle.

    Eyes off the ball

    Last week, in overturning a lower court decision that should have allowed Assange to walk free, the English High Court consented to effectively keep Assange locked up indefinitely.  He is a remand prisoner – found guilty of no crime – and yet he will continue rotting in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future, barely seeing daylight or other human beings, in Belmarsh high-security prison alongside Britain’s most dangerous criminals.

    The High Court decision forces our eyes off the ball once again. Assange and his supposed “crime” of seeking transparency and accountability has become the story rather than the crimes he exposed that were carried out by the US to lay waste to whole regions and devastate the lives of millions.

    The goal is to stop the public conducting the debate Assange wanted to initiate through his journalism: about western state crimes. Instead the public is being deflected into a debate his persecutors want: whether Assange can ever safely be allowed out of his cell.

    Assange’s lawyers are being diverted from the real issues too. They will now be tied up for years fighting endless rearguard actions, caught up in the search for legal technicalities, battling to win a hearing in any court they can, to prevent his extradition to the United States to stand trial.

    The process itself has taken over. And while the legal minutiae are endlessly raked over, the substance of the case – that it is US and British officials who ought to be held responsible for committing war crimes – will be glossed over.

    Permanently silenced

    But it is worse than the legal injustice of Assange’s case. There may be no hack-saws needed this time, but this is as visceral a crime against journalism as the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials back in 2018.

    And the outcome for Assange is only slightly less preordained than it was for Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The goal for US officials has always been about permanently disappearing Assange. They are indifferent about how that is achieved.

    If the legal avenue is a success, he will eventually head to the US where he can be locked away for up to 175 years in severe solitary confinement in a super-max jail – that is, till long past his death from natural causes. But there is every chance he will not survive that long. Last January, a British judge rejected extraditing Julian Assange to the US over his “suicide risk“, and medical experts have warned that it will be only a matter of time before he succeeds.

    That was why the district court blocked extradition – on humanitarian grounds. Those grounds were overturned by the High Court last week only because the US offered “assurances” that measures would be in place to ensure Assange did not commit suicide. But Assange’s lawyers pointed out: those assurances “were not enough to address concerns about his fragile mental health and high risk of suicide”. These concerns should have been apparent to the High Court justices.

    Further, dozens of former officials in the Central Intelligence Agency and the previous US administration have confirmed that the agency planned to execute Assange in an extrajudicial operation in 2017. That was shortly before the US was forced by circumstance to switch to the current, formal extradition route. The arguments now made for his welfare by the same officials and institutions that came close to killing him should never have been accepted as made in good faith.

    In fact, there is no need to speculate about the Americans’ bad faith. It is only too apparent in the myriad get-out clauses in the “assurances” they provided. Those assurances can be dropped, for example, if US officials decide Assange is not being cooperative. The promises can and will be disregarded the moment they become an encumbrance on Washington’s ability to keep Assange permanently silenced.

    ‘Trapped in a cage’

    But if losing the extradition battle is high stakes, so is the legal process itself. That could finish Assange off long before a decision is reached, as his fiancee Stella Moris indicated at the weekend. She confirmed that Assange suffered a small stroke during a hearing in October in the endless extradition proceedings. There are indications he suffered neurological damage, and is now on anti-stroke medication to try to stop a recurrence.

    Assange and his friends believe the stroke was brought on by the constant double strain of his solitary confinement in Belmarsh and a legal process being conducted over his head, in which he is barely allowed to participate.

    Nils Melzer, the United Nations expert on torture, has repeatedly warned that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture in the nine years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking asylum from US efforts to persecute him.

    That form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be far more effective at breaking people than physical torture. Moris told the Daily Mail: “[The stroke] compounds our fears about [Assange’s] ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. … Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”

    And that indeed looks to be the prize for US officials that wanted him assassinated anyway. Whatever happens to Assange, the lawless US security state wins: it either gets him behind bars forever, or it kills him quietly and quite lawfully, while everyone is distracted, arguing about who Assange is rather what he exposed.

    Political prisoner

    In fact, with each twist and turn of the proceedings against Assange we move further from the realities at the heart of the case towards narrative distractions.

    Who remembers now the first extradition hearings, nearly two years ago, at which the court was reminded that the very treaty signed by Britain and the US that is the basis for Assange’s extradition explicitly excludes political cases of the kind being pursued by the US against Assange?

    It is a victory for state criminality that the discussion has devolved to Assange’s mental health rather than a substantive discussion of the treaty’s misapplication to serve political ends.

    And similarly the focus on US assurances regarding Assange’s wellbeing is intended to obscure the fact that a journalist’s work is being criminalised as “espionage” for the first time under a hurriedly drafted, draconian and discredited piece of First World War legislation, the 1917 Espionage Act. Because Assange is a political prisoner suffering political persecution, legal arguments are apparently powerless to save him. It is only a political campaign that can keep underscoring the sham nature of the charges he faces.

    The lies of power

    What Assange bequeathed us through Wikileaks was a harsh light capable of cutting through the lies of power and power of lies. He showed that western governments claiming the moral high ground were actually committing crimes in our name out of sight in far-off lands. He tore the mask off their hypocrisy.

    He showed that the many millions who took to the streets in cities around the world in 2003 because they knew the US and UK would commit war crimes in Iraq were right to march. But he also confirmed something worse: that their opposition to the war was treated with utter contempt.

    The US and UK did not operate more carefully, they were not more respectful of human rights, they did not tread more lightly in Iraq because of those marches, because of the criticism beforehand. The western war machine carried on regardless, crushing the lives of anyone who got caught up in its maw.

    Now with Assange locked up and silenced, western foreign policy can return comfortably to the era of zero accountability that existed before Assange shook up the whole system with his revelations. No journalist will dare to repeat what Assange did – not unless they are ready to spend the rest of their days behind bars.

    The message his abuse sends to others could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.

    The truth is journalism is already reeling from the combined assaults against Khashoggi and Assange. But the hounding of Assange strikes the bigger blow. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge, no sanctuary anywhere in the world.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Despite Repeated Appeals, US Denies Possibility Of Unfreezing Afghan Assets

    US White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified on Tuesday, December 14 said that the government has no plan to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets. Psaki was responding to a public call by Afghanistan’s foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi made a day earlier to unfreeze the assets. The US government had announced a freeze of nearly USD 10 billion worth of Afghanistan’s assets days after the Taliban took over power in the country on August 15, claiming the possibility of misuse of the funds. It also severed all diplomatic relations with Afghanistan after the complete withdrawal of its troops on August 30.

    The post Despite Repeated Appeals, US Denies Possibility Of Unfreezing Afghan Assets appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘The Taliban say they’ll kill me if they find me’: a female reporter still on the run speaks out

    We return to the story of a journalist forced to flee as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August. Unable to return home without putting at risk everyone she loves and hounded by threatening calls, she remains in hiding in the country four months on

    I am an Afghan female journalist and I have been on the run for more than four months. I have lived in numerous safe houses and the homes of people who’ve offered me refuge. I am constantly moving to avoid being caught, from province to province, city to city.

    The Taliban insurgents have been threatening to kill me and my colleagues for two years, for our reports exposing their crimes in our province. But when they seized control of our provincial capital, they started to hunt for those who had spoken out against them. I decided to escape, for my own and my family’s safety.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Fresh evidence on UK’s botched Afghan withdrawal backs whistleblower’s story

    MPs’ inquiry given further details of Britain’s mismanagement of Afghanistan exit with ‘people left to die at the hands of the Taliban’

    Further evidence alleging that the government seriously mishandled the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been handed to a parliamentary inquiry examining the operation, the Observer has been told.

    Details from several government departments and agencies are understood to back damning testimony from a Foreign Office whistleblower, who has claimed that bureaucratic chaos, ministerial intervention, and a lack of planning and resources led to “people being left to die at the hands of the Taliban”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • High Court hands Priti Patel final decision on US extradition of Julian Assange

    Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to the US. Judge Holdroyde ruled that the US appeal was allowed. Assange has been detained in Belmarsh prison since 2019. Prior to that, he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The speed of any extradition now appears to depend on home secretary Priti Patel.

    Assange is wanted by the US in connection with the publication of thousands of documents about the Iraq War. Previously a judge ruled against Assange being extradited due to his mental health. The US appealed this decision.

    US journalist Kevin Gosztola was in the courtroom:

    The extradition case will now be handed over to the US Secretary of State:

    It appears that Assange still has options for appeal. Though this is being described as a very serious loss:

    Barrister Adam Wagner tweeted some of the specifics of the decision. The courts claim that the US has provided a satisfactory “package of assurances”.

    Assange’s treatment at the hands of the authorities has been a topic of controversy. In 2020, the Lancet medical journal argued that his treatment amounted to torture and medical neglect.

    Some have argued that due to alleged CIA plans to assassinate Assange, he should not be handed over to the US.

    As Wikileaks pointed out yesterday, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) share this view:

    For now, Assange’s fate lays with home secretary Priti Patel.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit

    Protest by students in Thailand. AP

    President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.

    The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an opportunity for people and governments around the world to express their concerns about the flaws in U.S. democracy and the undemocratic way the United States deals with the rest of the world. Here are just a few issues that should be considered:

    (1)  The U.S. claims to be a leader in global democracy at a time when its own already deeply flawed democracy is crumbling, as evidenced by the shocking January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. On top of the systemic problem of a duopoly that keeps other political parties locked out and the obscene influence of money in politics, the U.S. electoral system is being further eroded by the increasing tendency to contest credible election results and widespread efforts to suppress voter participation (19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote).

    A broad global ranking of countries by various measures of democracy puts the U.S. at # 33, while the U.S. government-funded Freedom House ranks the United States at # 61 in the world for political freedom and civil liberties, on a par with Mongolia, Panama and Romania.

    (2)  The unspoken U.S. agenda at this “summit” is to demonize and isolate China and Russia. But if we agree that democracies should be judged by how they treat their people, then why is the U.S. Congress failing to pass a bill to provide basic services like health care, child care, housing and education, which are guaranteed to most Chinese citizens for free or at minimal cost?

    And consider China’s extraordinary success in relieving poverty. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”

    China has also far surpassed the U.S. in dealing with the pandemic. Little wonder a Harvard University report found that over 90% of the Chinese people like their government. One would think that China’s extraordinary domestic achievements would make the Biden administration a bit more humble about its “one-size-fits-all” concept of democracy.

    (3)  The climate crisis and the pandemic are a wake-up call for global cooperation, but this Summit is transparently designed to exacerbate divisions. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors to Washington have publicly accused the United States of staging the summit to stoke ideological confrontation and divide the world into hostile camps, while China held a competing International Democracy Forum with 120 countries the weekend before the U.S. summit.

    Inviting the government of Taiwan to the U.S. summit further erodes the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China policy and agreed to cut back military installations on Taiwan.

    Also invited is the corrupt anti-Russian government installed by the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which reportedly has half its military forces poised to invade the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, who declared independence in response to the 2014 coup. The U.S. and NATO have so far supported this major escalation of a civil war that already killed 14,000 people.

    (4)  The U.S. and its Western allies—the self-anointed leaders of human rights—just happen to be the major suppliers of weapons and training to some of the world’s most vicious dictators. Despite its verbal commitment to human rights, the Biden administration and Congress recently approved a $650 million weapons deal for Saudi Arabia at a time when this repressive kingdom is bombing and starving the people of Yemen.

    Heck, the administration even uses U.S. tax dollars to “donate” weapons to dictators, like General Sisi in Egypt, who oversees a regime with thousands of political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Of course, these U.S. allies were not invited to the Democracy Summit—that would be too embarrassing.

    (5)  Perhaps someone should inform Biden that the right to survive is a basic human right. The right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

    So why is the U.S. imposing brutal sanctions on countries from Venezuela to North Korea that are causing inflation, scarcity, and malnutrition among children? Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has blasted the United States for engaging in “economic warfare” and compared its illegal unilateral sanctions to medieval sieges. No country that purposely denies children the right to food and starves them to death can call itself a champion of democracy.

    (6)   Since the United States was defeated by the Taliban and withdrew its occupation forces from Afghanistan, it is acting as a very sore loser and reneging on basic international and humanitarian commitments. Certainly Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a setback for human rights, especially for women, but pulling the plug on Afghanistan’s economy is catastrophic for the entire nation.

    The United States is denying the new government access to billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in U.S. banks, causing a collapse in the banking system. Hundreds of thousands of public servants have not been paid. The UN is warning that millions of Afghans are at risk of starving to death this winter as the result of these coercive measures by the United States and its allies.

    (7)  It’s telling that the Biden administration had such a difficult time finding Middle Eastern countries to invite to the summit. The United States just spent 20 years and $8 trillion trying to impose its brand of democracy on the Middle East and Afghanistan, so you’d think it would have a few proteges to showcase.

    But no. In the end, they could only agree to invite the state of Israel, an apartheid regime that enforces Jewish supremacy over all the land it occupies, legally or otherwise. Embarrassed to have no Arab states attending, the Biden administration added Iraq, whose unstable government has been racked by corruption and sectarian divisions ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its brutal security forces have killed over 600 demonstrators since huge anti-government protests began in 2019.

    (8)  What, pray tell, is democratic about the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo Bay? The U.S. Government opened the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002 as a way to circumvent the rule of law as it kidnapped and jailed people without trial after the crimes of September 11, 2001. Since then, 780 men have been detained there. Very few were charged with any crime or confirmed as combatants, but still they were tortured, held for years without charges, and never tried.

    This gross violation of human rights continues, with most of the 39 remaining detainees never even charged with a crime. Yet this country that has locked up hundreds of innocent men with no due process for up to 20 years still claims the authority to pass judgment on the legal processes of other countries, in particular on China’s efforts to cope with Islamist radicalism and terrorism among its Uighur minority.

    (9)  With the recent investigations into the March 2019 U.S. bombing in Syria that left 70 civilians dead and the drone strike that killed an Afghan family of ten in August 2021, the truth of massive civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and airstrikes is gradually emerging, as well as how these war crimes have perpetuated and fueled the “war on terror,” instead of winning or ending it.

    If this was a real democracy summit, whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have risked so much to expose the reality of U.S. war crimes to the world, would be honored guests at the summit instead of political prisoners in the American gulag.

    (10)  The United States picks and chooses countries as “democracies” on an entirely self-serving basis. But in the case of Venezuela, it has gone even farther and invited an imaginary U.S.-appointed “president” instead of the country’s actual government.

    The Trump administration anointed Juan Guaidó as “president” of Venezuela, and Biden invited him to the summit, but Guaidó is neither a president nor a democrat, and he boycotted parliamentary elections in 2020 and regional elections in 2021. But Guaido did come tops in one recent opinion poll, with the highest public disapproval of any opposition figure in Venezuela at 83%, and the lowest approval rating at 13%.

    Guaidó named himself “interim president” (without any legal mandate) in 2019, and launched a failed coup against the elected government of Venezuela. When all his U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow the government failed, Guaidó signed off on a mercenary invasion which failed even more spectacularly. The European Union no longer recognizes Guaido’s claim to the presidency, and his “interim foreign minister” recently resigned, accusing Guaidó of corruption.

    Conclusion

    Just as the people of Venezuela have not elected or appointed Juan Guaidó as their president, the people of the world have not elected or appointed the United States as the president or leader of all Earthlings.

    When the United States emerged from the Second World War as the strongest economic and military power in the world, its leaders had the wisdom not to claim such a role. Instead they brought the whole world together to form the United Nations, on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, a universal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and a prohibition on the threat or use of force against each other.

    The United States enjoyed great wealth and international power under the UN system it devised. But in the post-Cold War era, power-hungry U.S. leaders came to see the UN Charter and the rule of international law as obstacles to their insatiable ambitions. They belatedly staked a claim to universal global leadership and dominance, relying on the threat and use of force that the UN Charter prohibits. The results have been catastrophic for millions of people in many countries, including Americans.

    Since the United States has invited its friends from around the world to this ”democracy summit,” maybe they can use the occasion to try to persuade their bomb-toting friend to recognize that its bid for unilateral global power has failed, and that it should instead make a real commitment to peace, cooperation and international democracy under the rules-based order of the UN Charter.

    The post Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • House Passes Largest Military Budget Since WWII Despite Afghanistan War’s End

    House Passes Largest Military Budget Since WWII Despite End of Afghanistan War

    President Biden may soon approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, which ramps up spending to counter China and Russia. Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid the devastating ongoing war in Yemen. “The last thing we need to do is be throwing more money at the Pentagon,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “This whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: President Biden may soon vote to approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, with a 5% increase over last year’s military spending bill. The $768 billion military budget is $24 billion higher than what Biden requested despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The package includes funds aimed at countering China’s power and to build Ukraine’s military strength. It also includes nearly $28 billion in nuclear weapons funding.

    The bill is headed to the Senate, then to President Biden, after the House approved the bill late Tuesday night with more Republicans than Democrats voting for it. Among those who voted no was progressive New York Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, who tweeted, quote, “It is astounding how quickly Congress moves weapons but we can’t ensure housing, care, and justice for our veterans, nor invest in robust jobs programs for districts like mine.” Bowman also criticized how the compromise bill strips funding that would have established an office for countering extremism in the Pentagon, saying the bill, quote, “must also protect the Black men and women who are disproportionately the target of extremism and a biased military justice system,” unquote.

    Also absent from the bill is a provision to require women to register for the draft.

    Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen.

    For more, we’re joined by Bill Hartung, director of Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, author of a new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden,” his latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

    Bill Hartung, welcome back to Democracy Now! First of all, if you can just respond to the House passage of the largest weapons spending bill in U.S. history since World War II?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think it’s an outrage, if you look at what we really need. You know, in the roundup, you talked about the need to spend on pandemic preparedness. The world is on fire with the impacts of climate change. We’ve got deep problems of racial and economic injustice in this country. We’ve got an insurrection and violence trying to undermine our democracy. So the last thing we need to do is be throwing more money at the Pentagon. And it’s a huge amount. It’s more than we spent in Vietnam, the Korean War, the Reagan buildup of the ’80s, all throughout the Cold War. And as you said, even at the time as Biden has pulled out U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget keeps going up and up.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Bill Hartung, could respond specifically to the fact that the budget is $24 billion more than what was requested? Is it common to have such a huge difference in terms of the amount requested and the amount granted, $24 billion?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Congress often adds money for pet projects — Boeing aircraft in Missouri, attack submarines in Connecticut and Virginia — but nothing at this level. You know, $24 billion is the biggest congressional add-on that I can think of in recent memory. So it’s kind of extraordinary, especially, as we said, when the endless wars should be winding down.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you talk about some of the key figures in Congress who have been pushing for an increase?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you’ve got people like James Inhofe, who’s the Republican lead on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who’s basically said we need to spend 3 to 5% more per year in perpetuity, which would push the budget over a trillion dollars within five to six years. He is always touting a report called the National Defense Strategy Commission report, which was put together primarily by people who were from the arms industry, from think tanks funded by the arms industry. Basically, it was a kind of a special interest collection that were pushing this.

    And then you have Mike Rogers from Alabama, who’s the key player on House Armed Services. He’s got Huntsville in his state, and Huntsville is sort of the missile capital of America — Army missiles, missile defense systems. He also gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the weapons industry for his reelection. So, there’s a strong kind of pork barrel special interest push by the military-industrial complex that help bring about this result.

    AMY GOODMAN: The Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt the $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, this amidst the devastating ongoing war on Yemen. I want to play a clip of Senators Paul and Sanders addressing the Senate Tuesday.

    SEN. RAND PAUL: The U.S. should end all arms sales to the Saudis until they end their blockade of Yemen. President Biden said he would change the Trump policy of supporting Saudi’s war in Yemen, but it’s not all that apparent that policy has changed. … We commission these weapons, and we should not give them to countries who are starving children and are committing, essentially, genocide in Yemen.

    SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: President, I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable and unusual position of agreeing with Senator Paul.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Senator Sanders and Paul. Bill Hartung, you’re the author of the new report headlined “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Can you talk about the significance of this, what was voted down?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, these missiles are air-to-air missiles, which can be used to enforce the air blockade that’s been put over Yemen. So, the Saudis have bombed the Sana’a airport runways. They’ve tried to keep ships from coming in with fuel. And as a result, costs of medical supplies now are out of the reach of the average person of Yemen. People haven’t been able to leave the country for medical treatment. Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE say 32,000 people have probably died just for lack of being able to leave the country for that specialized care. Four hundred thousand children are at risk, according to the World Food Programme, of starvation because of the blockade. Millions of Yemenis need humanitarian aid just to survive, and the Saudi blockade is making it increasingly difficult to get that aid or to get commercial goods that they need.

    So, basically, this is a criminal enterprise run by Mohammed bin Salman. And Joe Biden said, when he was a candidate, Saudi Arabia, we’d treat it like an pariah; he wouldn’t arm them. In his first foreign policy speech, he said the U.S. should stop support for offensive operations in Yemen. And yet he’s approved a contract for maintenance of Saudi planes and attack helicopters, and now this deal for the missiles. So he’s basically gone back on his pledge to forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia and to use U.S. leverage to end the blockade and the war itself.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bill, before we conclude, just to go back to the military budget, could you comment specifically on the $28 billion earmarked for nuclear weapons?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, unfortunately, this bill doubles down on the Pentagon’s buildup of a new generation of nuclear weapons, a new generation of nuclear warheads, which is, of course, the last thing we need at a time of global tensions. You know, in particular, there was even a provision that said it’s not allowed to reduce the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are the most dangerous weapons in the world because they could easily be used by accident if there were a false alarm of attack, because the president has only minutes to decide whether to use these things. So, I think that’s one of the biggest stains on this bill, is basically continuing to stoke the nuclear arms race, not only at great cost but at great risk to the future of the planet.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the China and Russia being used as justification for weapons sales and increased military budget, can you compare the U.S. military budget to theirs?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the U.S. spends about 10 times what Russia spends, about three times what China spends. It has 13 times as many active nuclear warheads in its stockpile as China does. We’ve got 11 aircraft carriers of a type that China doesn’t have. We’ve got 800 U.S. military bases around the globe, while China has three. So this whole idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States has primarily been manufactured to jump up the military budget. And so far, unfortunately, at least in the halls of Congress and the Biden administration, that’s been successful.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. We’ll link to your new report, “Arming Repression: U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” Hartung’s latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

    Next up, calls are growing for President Biden to extend the moratorium on student debt payments as millions face a debt crisis during the pandemic. We’ll speak with the Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor about her new animated film, Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Humaira Rasuli is the recipient of the 2021 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award

    The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) has named Afghan human rights lawyer and feminist Humaira Rasuli as the recipient of the 2021 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award. [For more on this award and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/607BB850-4813-489B-A47D-3965F2078E1F]

    It is hoped that the award will “further inspire the world to pay closer attention to human rights in Afghanistan, especially women’s rights” and “encourage human rights defenders and those who have been deprived of human rights,”

    According to the TFD, Rasuli has been actively involved in social activism and the promotion of women’s rights at a young age and thorough her years of work, “Afghan women have gradually been able to receive justice from judicial procedures.”

    As the co-founder and executive director of the Women for Justice Organization, Rasuli has led lawyers, gender experts and activists in efforts to increase women’s access to justice, uphold the rule of law in Afghanistan, and investigate some of the most emblematic sex crime cases in the country over the years, the TFD said in its statement.

    She also previously served as director of Medica Afghanista, another organization that provides psychosocial counseling and legal support to female survivors of sexual violence. However, in an interview with the European public broadcaster, Arte, aired in September, Rasuli revealed that she has relocated to the U.S. following the U.S. military pull-out from Afghanistan.

    The TFD on Tuesday declined to confirm Rasuli’s current whereabouts, but said she would deliver her acceptance speech in a pre-recorded video that would be published on its website on 10 December.

    The foundation said it would not host a physical award ceremony this year due to COVID-19.

    https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202111300019

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

    Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.

    The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

    Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.

    Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’s choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it, or “defense” as the dictionary defines it.

    U.S. society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.

    Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world—even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place.

    While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.

    This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

    The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.

    But no such cut happened. U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.

    The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.”

    Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

    Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the U.S. decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project U.S. power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions.

    Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt U.S. politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War, and reducing congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for.

    It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” (President Eisenhower’s original wording) is reaping the benefits.

    Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

    Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.

    According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his Farewell Address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to “insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.”

    As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Austin and Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt MIC conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.

    So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.

    Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.

    The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.

    There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.

    If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s U.S. military.

    Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.

    Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

     

     

    The post How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • West condemns Taliban over ‘summary killings’ of ex-soldiers and police

    Human Rights Watch says 47 former members of Afghan national security forces have been killed or forcibly disappeared

    The US has led a group of western nations and allies in condemnation of the Taliban over the “summary killings” of former members of the Afghan security forces reported by rights groups, demanding quick investigations.

    “We are deeply concerned by reports of summary killings and enforced disappearances of former members of the Afghan security forces as documented by Human Rights Watch and others,” read a statement by the US, EU, Australia, Britain, Japan and others, which was released by the state department on Saturday.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Afghan Emirate’s Challenge to the World

    What happened to news about Afghanistan? After their spectacular sweep of the entire country and overnight victory, there is no news now. And Taliban websites remain closed. Just human interest stuff about traitors/ cowards/ whatevers fleeing to the US or wherever. A convening of Afghan women parliamentarians, holding a mock Afghan parliament in exile (a Greek refugee camp). The hysteria about girls schooling ignores the well-documented but little known fact that almost all the schools (80%) that were supposedly educating girls throughout the country were non-functioning or even non-existent. And those teachers who were actually being paid were just pocketing the money (much of it first taken by local officials, who in turn funneled a portion to warlords).

    In fact, all schooling was mostly nonexistent, even for boys, so Afghanistan is actually less literate now, thanks to the US invasion, than it was 20 years ago, and even less literate than in 1978, the last year of peace, when women were going to university and those in Kabul were hijab-less, let alone birqa-less.

    Of course, the fault lies entirely with the nasty Taliban, though they didn’t even exist before 1978. War is nasty business and it’s always the other guy’s fault. And when you lose, you just move on, try to forget. So what if you left the scene-of-the-crime a basket case? Where is Afghanistan anyway?

    The US has a standard operating procedure: bomb the enemy to smithereens. If that doesn’t work, bomb some more. Then find some civilians who have been riddled with your bullets, fly them to Bagram air base for (the best) emergency treatment, try and fit the body pieces together, and presto! a human interest story highlighting how noble you are, how scientific. If that still doesn’t work and you’re getting flak at home, then cut your losses, pull out, and move on to the next enemy (all the time, boycotting the old enemy so it can’t threaten you). Eventually, as you are the world’s sole superpower now, the enemy will come begging and you can relent a bit.

    That was how Vietnam panned out, though it took 20 years to get around to recognizing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It’s a bizarre kind of win-win: even if you lose, the target is reduced to a failed state which is a model for no one, rather a warning for anyone contemplating trying to get out of US clutches. If you win, you can decide just how prosperous the new client state will be. Japan, Korea, and of course Germany got the VIP treatment. (WWI lesson learned: don’t ‘fail’ a big, powerful state). Vietnam managed to recover, and since it is happy to join the US-controlled world economy, it has been allowed to prosper. Reparations are never an option.

    That these horrendous wars never seem to bring any peace, let along goodwill, doesn’t faze US ‘planners’. Bombing is easy, and cheap (given that you have a military-industrial complex that is the very engine of your prosperity). It’s the new US norm. ‘It’s what we do.’

    The complementary policy to these senseless, horrible wars is the fanatical anti-ideology, which since the days of McCarthyism, seems to run in American veins. There is only one way to live, the American way, and any other option is by definition wrong, mistaken, evil. In the 1950s anti-communism poisoned US culture, and led the US down the proverbial rabbit-hole, destroying any socialist revolution on the globe before it could catch hold, cutting off the one path that can save our civilization from its current road to oblivion. Afghanistan provided the perfect battlefront for the latest US obsession (far away, mostly desert and mountains, good for target practice).

    Oh, almost forgot. Lie to enemy, even when they want to surrender. Most Taliban wanted to give up after the US invaded. They weren’t idiots. After a blanket offer by top Taliban leaders to resign was rejected, individuals tried to broker a deal for themselves. After a dozen agreed and were promptly arrested and sent to Bagram, Guantanamo or just tortured and killed, others realized their only future lay in resistance, so they regrouped, some in Pakistan, most just locally where they lived. Sleeper cells were activated and by 2003, as the corruption and murder/ torture by Afghan yes-men blossomed, the rural population started to support the Taliban. Soon half of Afghanistan was being administered by them, providing justice, collecting taxes.

    So why no interest in what’s happening now that the US is gone? And was the US project doomed from the start? Were all those trillions of dollars, 100,000s of lives for naught? Is there a Rosebud?

    Taliban ‘won’ in 2002

    The best way to answer that and what’s happening now is to see what happened under US occupation, but from the Afghan point of view. The Taliban have been governing most of Afghanistan for 15 years now. Anand Gopal’s No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes (2014) does this. He follows the lives of a few local heroes from 2001 to 2010, and presents events through their eyes.

    The answer starts in the dying days of the communist government, which had started out much like the US occupation, brokering peace with local warlords, having scaled back its development projects as things deteriorated. It held on, annoying the US, but then the peace was signed in 1988, ending arming of both sides–which US promptly ignored. For 3 years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the CIA kept weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. When President Najibullah ran out of arms, the mujahideen took over. That was Bush I’s thank you to Gorbachev for dismantling the Soviet Union. (Lying is ok if you’re lying to the enemy.)

    When 9/11 came, Akbar Gul was already a star Taliban fighter, battling the Northern Alliance to the end. When the US invaded, he quit and tried exile, but after being robbed several times in Karachi, he returned to his native Wardak, learned how to fix mobile phones by trial and error, becoming well known as ‘mobile-phone Akbar’. But the US offered no amnesty for those who wanted to leave the movement, and the thieving and violence of the police and Karzai’s stooges, who now were in power and seeking revenge or just riches, became intolerable. A phone call from an old comrade to ‘get to work again’ was heeded.

    Between 2003 and 2010, he was the commander in Wardak, just southwest of Kabul, responsible for assassinating government officials, kidnapping policemen, deploying suicide bombs, killing US soldiers. He even hijacked two tanker trailers full of gas, paid off the drivers, bought arms on the black market, and divided the booty among his team. When interviewed the last time in 2010, he was disillusioned with the stressful life and the increasing intra-Taliban squabbles and one-up-manship. But it was also clear that the US had lost almost from the start with its mania to wipe out the enemy, just as it failed in Iraq to wipe out the Baathists, merely turning them into insurgents.

    Gopal describes the background to this. The lure of the Taliban in the 1990s held much the same allure by 2003, as ‘a home for unsettled youths,’ repulsed by the chaos their country was descending into. It provided ‘a sense of purpose, a communion with something greater.’ Akbar recalled receiving some instruction once on bomb-making from an Arab, presumably al-Qaeda, but otherwise had no interest in international politics, was barely able to read and write. He resented Mullah Omar’s support for bin Laden and his call to martyrdom following 9/11. Instead, he disbanded his men: ‘Go home. Don’t contact each other.’

    How close the US was to victory! If only they had left with their al-Qaeda spoils in 2002, amnestied the Taliban, with a solemn promise not to promote terrorism.

    Heela Achakzai graduated from university in the 1990, married her suitor Musqinyar, an idealist but a secular one, a communist. Though not interested in politics, Heela liked the communists for providing services and freedom for women, but as the Soviet troops retreated, the writing was on the wall, and they fled Kabul to Musqinyar’s family home in Khas Uruzgan. Although she was now effectively under house-arrest, complete with burqa and meshr (male guardian), she liked the Taliban for putting an end to tribal practices, including using females to settle feuds. And they didn’t kill her communist husband either. They lived in safety.

    When 9/11 brought US soldiers and a return of anti-Taliban warlords, her village descended into violence. Her husband was assassinated by a Karzai crony, local warlord Jan Muhammad Khan. She would have had to marry her brother-in-law as second wife, give him her home and possessions. No way. Her story is rivetting. She fled to the US base in Tirin kot, eventually worked promoting elections and and as a midwife. One villager elder told her that while this type of work wasn’t good for ‘our women, the the villages’ it was fitting for ‘educated women like you.’

    Heela also provided medicines to Taliban when they asked, thinking ‘Given Jan Muhammad and Commander Zahir and the others on the government’s side, why wouldn’t they fight?’ Then she was nominated and became a senator, having quietly worked with the Americans. (I presume she was evacuated in August, though she could well return. She is no traitor-coward.)

    Jan Muhammad Khan, Khas Uruzban warlord, plotted with Karzai after the Taliban came to power in 1996, and was about to be executed when 9/11 happened. He was appointed governor of Khas Uruzgan and moved quickly to amass wealth, feeding the US intelligence about Taliban, all of it fabricated (there were no Taliban), used to target his rivals. The US was blind to this but the people of Khas Uruzgan weren’t, and the US attempt to rebuild Afghanistan ended up only enriching the new US-backed elite, and turning most people against the Americans.

    As the Taliban were the only other choice, they gained support. US backers like Jan created nonexistent Taliban to keep the dollars and arms coming. For a country that prides itself as a model to be emulated around the world, it is hard to understand how the US could be so easily hoodwinked for 20 years at a cost of trillions, almost all of it wasted, enriching a handful of corrupt cronies, creating Potemkin villages and spiriting ill-gotten gains abroad. And, in a final irony, warlords like Jan spirited out at the last minute (Jan was assassinated in 2011) along with girls football teams and other Afghans who trusted the US.

    Gopal concludes: the Americans were not fighting a war on terror at all, they were simply targeting those who were not part of the Sherzi clan [another warlord, also later killed by a bomb] and Karzi networks.

    US troops fueled insurgency, ISIS

    Interestingly, Karzai did not flee in August, as did his successor, Ghani, who fled to Dubai with several suitcases full of cash. Karzai was never an easy ally for the US. During an interview with Voice of America in 2017, he claimed that ISIS in Afghanistan is a tool for the US, that he does not differentiate at all between ISIS and the US. In May 2021, he told Der Spiegel he sympathized with the Taliban, and saw them as “victims of foreign forces” and said that Afghans were being used to be ‘each against the other.’ Clearly hedging his bets.

    There were more than a few mass killings by crazed US soldiers, recalling My Lai. Gopal documents the case of Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, awarded a Silver Star for his cold blooded murder of innocents in Khas Uruzgan. A Google search only turns up glowing reports of Pryor’s heroism, but the truth is he murdered 21 pro-American leaders and workers (which the US admitted), with 26 taken prisoner. Which is not much better than a bullet in the head.

    That US troops meant more terrorism, killing, was explained by Eckart Schiewek, political advisor with the UN mission. The same jockeying for power by warlords Dostum and Atta in the north never boiled over. ‘There were no American troops. You couldn’t call on soldiers to settle your feuds.’ By allying with various warlords outside the puppet government, the US undermined the puppet, syphoning funds to pay endless bribes to warlords, and created the petri dish for feuds over who’s closest to the US. A truly vile scenario, especially for a people as fiercely proud and independent as Afghans. By 2005 US fatalities doubled from previous year, and kidnappings and assassinations came in record numbers. Already it was too late. As for poppy elimination, that too became a program to wipe out other tribes’ competition and keep prices high.

    Gopal concludes that there were almost no Taliban or ISIS among Guantanamo prisoners, that most prisoners there and in Afghanistan were casualties of warlord-governors’ phony intelligence whose sole purpose was power and money.

    Real news

    Considering the general news blackout or deliberately anti-Taliban stories, we must look to events during the occupation through the eyes of such as Gopal, Jere Van Dyk, and memoirs of Taliban leaders, and the role of Islam itself in shaping Afghanistan’s future, as this is the bedrock of Taliban thinking and action. To not only respect Islam, but welcome it. “The Taliban was now a part of our family,” said Bowe Bergdahl’s mother Jani, as she waited stoically for news of her hostage son (eventually released). She was just stating a fact and dealing with it, not rejecting or despising it.

    First, ‘jurisprudence is part of the Taliban’s DNA, even to a fault,’ as that is their training (12 years for judges). Governing means providing justice. In a village under Taliban control for two years, the malek (mayor) told Gopal that ‘in that time crime had vanished.’ Taliban ‘police’ had captured a known child molester and turned him over to Islamic justice, with ‘judges tarring his face, parading him around Chak, and forcing him to apologize publicly. If caught again, he would be executed.’ People preferred Taliban austerity to government and foreign impunity.

    Real world political and economic troubles are pushed aside, or dealt with cavalierly, especially anything smacking of western decadence, as the road to hell is paved with seductive music, images, foods, drugs, etc. So that is what’s happening now. Cleaning the slate, exorcizing society of the demons who latched on to the rich heathen invaders. The Taliban are busy dismantling the US puppet infrastructure, finding warlords and bringing some justice to villages and cities.

    Times have changed. Whereas in 1999, it was still possible to smash TVs and radios, keep women off the air, it no longer is. And whereas Afghanistan’s fabulous musical traditions and non-Islamic culture were repressed, destroyed, they are not pushing this any longer. Gopal listened to the Taliban insurgents’ music, watched tapes of Taliban fights with the invader.

    All Taliban websites were banned in August, but Deputy Minister for information and broadcasting of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-IEA Zabihullah Mujahid now has a twitter account. The most recent messages (with lots of insulting comments):

    1. West should not impose its civilization on us, we have an Islamic civilization, and the system of Islamic society that already exists.
    2. Islamic Emirate announces complete ban on the use of foreign currency in the country.
    3. ISIS attack on 400-bed hospital fails, 4 ISIS killed.

    There is another twitter account the Emirate, even charging westerners with a Trumpian ‘fake news’ for suggesting ISIS will grow again if sanctions continue. Voice of Jihad was the Taliban’s main English language site till it was closed. Googling Voice of Jihad Islamic Emiirate of Afghanistan, I found
    https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan which includes more unfiltered news of Taliban. Otherwise Al-Jazeera is the best source.

    So what about girls’ education? With no jobs waiting for high school graduates, villagers could only see potential ruin in allowing their daughters outside. Which is the cart and which the horse?

    It is wrong to think the Taliban are anti-education. They are ‘students,’ and the highest calling is teaching and administering justice. But they don’t want the US determining what is taught and to whom. They follow sharia, not tribal law, which is much better for women.

    The moral of this story?

    Justice is the main thing a government can provide, but for Muslims, it means a strict, god-fearing government. Iran, though Shia, had an Islamic revolution too, and as such is in US crosshairs, much like Afghanistan. It has survived 40 years of US-Israel bullying and worse, so its experience will be important for the Taliban. It is big on the death penalty, and the Emirate of Afghanistan most likely will be too. Women must wear scarves but study freely. Music and the arts are low key. This is most likely how Afghanistan will develop.

    The US can’t accept that Islamic justice is a worthwhile alternative to our very flawed systems of justice. Just as it couldn’t accept the truth that it’s better to be poor in a socialist society than in a capitalist one. Just ask 70% of Russians and the other orphaned ex-Soviets. The 1% needs to be brought under control, tamed to meet society’s pressing needs. And to take away the unease, resentment that eats away at society where the super rich flaunt their wealth and despise the common folk. This is not an easy task. The Taliban have stated recently there should be limits on wealth. They understand the truth behind the Lorenz curve.

    Gopal recounts meeting a one-eyed malek of a village, Garloch, that no longer existed. ‘Nothing you see here in this country belongs to us. You see that road out there? That’s not ours. Everything is borrowed and everything can be taken back.’ Gopal was intrigued by this Sufi wisdom. Garloch’s malek explained the vagaries of existence: First came the Taliban, then US soldiers, then planes killing the wrong suspect, then Taliban, then … until the villagers gave up and left, leaving the old mayor living under a plastic sheet in a gully. His message to Obama: ‘I don’t give a shit about your roads and schools! I want safety for my family.’

    Now comes the hard part. While Talib mullahs are busy righting wrongs and bringing a harsh but just communal peace, factions within the Taliban are also marshalling their forces, vying for power, not to mention the many collaborators, dreaming of another invasion. The revolutionary honeymoon is soon over, and the US continues to sit on Afghanistan’s meagre reserves, thinking about giving them away to 9/11 and other victims.

    Which of course would leave the Taliban nothing to feed Afghans, who will turn again to poppies to survive, which will lead to more US-led boycotting, etc.

    What’s happening now in Afghanistan demands our attention. And not the CNN version of events. It is heartening that such hardy, devoted souls like Gopal really care what happens to Afghans, and truly want the best for them. I want to know what has happened to the villains and heroes of his tale of life behind the lines. Sadly, our age of internet is letting us down on. I can only wish the Taliban well.

    *****

    Warlord Zaman: This whole land is filled with thieves and liars. This is what you Americans have made. I know this game. I went to the Americans and said, ‘I can find bin Laden. Give me $5m and I’ll bring you his head. Then I went to al-Qaeda and told them, ‘Give me $1m or I’ll turn you over the the Americans.’ So they gave me $1m, and I convinced the Americans to stop the bombing for a little while. I told them we could use the time to find Osama, but really it was so those Arab dogs could escape to Pakistan. Then I went to the ISI and said, ‘Give me $500,000 and I’ll give you al-Qaeda.’ They pulled a gun and told me to get out of their face. You see, they don’t play this game. You can’t buy them. Gopal, p148.

    The post Afghan Emirate’s Challenge to the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US is destroying the people of Afghanistan

    When the United States left Afghanistan in August it also froze almost all foreign aid to the country. Now, Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, writes Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster

    The 21st Century was supposed to be the century of continued and unchallenged global dominance by the U.S., at least that was the plan advanced by the right-wing political hacks at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Their optimism was understandable. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it was reasonable that the petit-bourgeois intellectual servants of capital would see no rival or check on U.S. power. According to liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, with the dismantling of the Soviet state and system, the historic struggle to establish the hegemony of classical liberalism and capitalism as the inevitable outcome of the “Western” driven project known as modernity had come in an end.

    For both classical liberals like Fukuyama and neoconservatives who would rise to power during the George W. Bush administration, it was asserted that the societies of the U.S. and Western Europe should be viewed as representative of the apex of collective human development that all should aspire to because history and objective rationalism had determined it so, and – “there is no alternative.”

    But human societies, even when they are claimed to be guided by objective scientific laws, have never emerged as a tabula rasa. What develops at any point in history is the outcome of the social and economic contradictions of the previous era with many of those unresolved contradictions still present in the new era.

    The permanent unipolar dominance of the U.S. and the end of history that was decreed in the nineties proved to be as much of an ideological fiction as the thousand-year rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. And like Hitler, with whom the managers of the U.S. empire share a common philosophical commitment to white supremacy along with the recognition that global hegemony required a colonial empire, U.S. policymakers also made fatal strategic blunders once they found themselves with unchallenged global power.

    Why?

    The delusional quality of consciousness and a worldview infused with white supremacist ideology makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals infected with this mental affliction to cognitively grasp the world as it really exists, let alone to understand the limitations of their power.

    That is precisely why with the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. found itself embroiled in two simultaneous military conflicts that U.S. policymakers thought they could successfully conduct with a poverty conscripted army and a dubious rationale provided by the “War on Terror.”

    However, instead of the global natives being in awe of U.S. power, by 2007 what Mao Zedong had proclaimed and the Vietnamize had confirmed and that was that the U.S. was a “paper-tiger.”

    And with the defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, did U.S. policymakers draw any lesson from a military-first strategy that would compel a reassessment of that approach? Of course not.

    In precipitous global decline and with an ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy domestically, the Obama administration launched and/or supported at least three wars, and the Trump administration continued many of those policies, including escalating tensions with both Russia and China.

    The Biden administration embraced the anti-Chinese belligerence of the Trump administration and the Obama administrations’ military pivot to Asia. These policies epitomized the dangerously irrational and desperate belief that military bluster would pre-empt or reverse the fate that all empires face when their subjects are no longer afraid and the rulers have become soft, corrupt and are unable to even convince themselves that they are still fit to rule.

    Yet, this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S.

    With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity. And it is why the rise of China is so incredibly disconcerting.

    That is why, like a crazed wounded animal during the decline of the white West, all of collective humanity is threatened by the devastating power of this narcissistic, colonial/capitalist minority of the global population that would rather destroy the world than to not be able to dominate it.

    But then again, revolutionary forces, states, and projects are demonstrating that collective humanity is not ready to allow the greed, barbarity and selfishness of the Western capitalist ruling class to lead to the demise of life on the planet. There is growing opposition. And that opposition is clear. In order for the world to live, the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy must die.

    The post The Delusional Commitment to the Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is leading the U.S. and the World to Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Three months of Taliban occupation: Barbarism unlimited

    November 16 marked exactly three months of Taliban occupation of Kabul, reports Yasmeen Afghan. The world cannot turn its back.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Migrant caravan and Qatar’s tarnished World Cup: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians

    An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.

    And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.

    At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.

    A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.

    In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.

    Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.

    Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?

    Colonial narrative

    The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.

    The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.

    This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.

    It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.

    Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?

    The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.

    The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”

    The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.

    That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.

    Pattern of behaviour

    But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.

    And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.

    But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.

    Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.

    It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.

    When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.

    As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”

    Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.

    The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.

    Killing innocents

    The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.

    Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.

    Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.

    Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.

    In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.

    That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.

    The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.

    No scrutiny

    Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.

    US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce.  But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.

    The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.

    The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.

    But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.

    That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.

    In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.

    Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as US and the West Freeze Government Funds

    Millions of Afghans Face Starvation as U.S. and the West Freeze Government Funds

    Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas. “Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently visited Afghanistan and with refugees in Iran, where as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing everyday. “They told me very clearly, ‘We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through.’”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hi, Juan.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today in Afghanistan where humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a video call with members of the AfghanEvac Coalition who said they need more help evacuating tens of thousands of people who could be targeted under the Taliban government and noted, “Winter is coming. There is a famine already.” The United Nations estimates 60% — that’s more than half of Afghanistan’s population — now suffer from acute hunger and the country faces a financial crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves held in banks overseas. The World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley told the BBC Afghanistan is now the worst humanitarian crisis on earth.

    DAVID BEASLEY: It is as bad as you can possibly imagine. In fact, we are now looking at the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth. Ninety-five percent of the people don’t have enough food and now we are looking at 23 million people marching toward starvation. Out of that, almost nine million are knocking on famine’s door. The winter months are coming. We’re coming out of a drought. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.

    AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. estimates half a million people could flee Afghanistan by the end of the year. Thousands of Afghan refugees are now crossing the border into neighboring Iran. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing into Iran every day. This could set up another crisis in Europe, where the European Union agreed Monday to new sanctions against Belarus for bringing some 4,000 migrants to the border with Poland and leaving them stranded in freezing forests.

    For more, we are joined by the NRC’s Secretary General Jan Egeland, who is in Oslo, Norway. He has just returned from a trip to Iran where he met with Afghan refugees in a refugee camp. He recently tweeted “Iran alone hosts more displaced Afghans than 30 European countries combined. Despite this, nations in the ‘European Championship In Erecting Barbed Wire against Refugees’ give negligible funds for displaced Afghans elsewhere.” His recent New York Times op-ed is headlined Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.

    Jan Egeland, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe the scope of the catastrophe in Afghanistan right now and what you think needs to happen.

    JAN EGELAND: I was myself recently also in Afghanistan and I sat down with the mothers in these displacement camps around Kabul. I asked them, “What about the future? What do you think of the future?” They told me very clearly, “We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through and unless there is a public sector again that is able to provide services.” It is as acute as that. Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the NATO countries not only went for the door, they took all of Afghanistan’s financial reserves with them as they left. They froze the assets of the Afghan government. Could you talk about the role of this issue of all of the money in Afghanistan essentially being held hostage by the Western nations that left?

    JAN EGELAND: Yes. There is a lot of issues over these last 20 years, and one of them is that there was an enormous aid dependency. Seventy percent of teachers, nurses, doctors, water engineers, garbage collectors, public workers were on the payroll of Western development donors. That was cut overnight. I met teachers who were eager to restart girls’ education and boys’ education. They hadn’t been paid since May. The banks are paralyzed because of the freezing of assets, so we, NRC, Norwegian Refugee Council, cannot transfer money to our colleagues in Kabul through the local bank system, not even extract money there to pay salaries for our 2,000 aid workers that did not go for the door, who are there to stay and deliver, because of this freezing of the economy. The Taliban has an enormous responsibility for good governance in the place that they took over, but I sincerely believe that NATO countries mustn’t forget they left behind 40 million people.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the role of Iran and Pakistan, which have basically shouldered an enormous refugee population, estimates of three million Afghans in Iran alone, and the failure of again the West to assist these countries in their efforts to assist the refugees?

    JAN EGELAND: Yes, indeed. Ninety percent of Afghan refugees — and there are many millions of them — accumulated over 40 years of fighting since the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan 40 years ago. The 90% of these refugees are in two countries, Iran and in Pakistan. They are not in Europe. They are not in North America. They are not in the rich countries. They are in these two neighboring countries. In Iran where I was, refugees are getting education and healthcare and so on, but the Iranian host communities are not getting much international assistance at all. Now that 4,000 or 5,000 come over the border every single day, 320,000 since the Taliban took over, it means that the Afghan refugees in Iran are very afraid of the future because they think that the little they have has to be divided in even smaller portions for all of those coming over the border. There has to be an investment in hope inside Afghanistan but also in the two neighboring countries.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about the conditions in the health centers in Afghanistan. This is an excerpt from a France 24 program which features Hasseebullah Barakzai, an administrator at a hospital in Kabul, where patients have to buy their own medicine, gloves and syringes. The clip begins with Masood, a nurse in the hospital.

    MASOOD: [translated] You see, we don’t have any medicine here. We used to have antibiotics, painkillers and vitamins here but it is empty now. In this cupboard we had medicine for heart patients. Now we don’t even have a tablet left. This water cooler doesn’t work anymore. Look, we don’t even have water to wash our hands.

    HASSEEBULLAH BARAKZAI: [translated] We don’t have enough food for the patients. Winter is here and we don’t have enough fuel for the heating system.

    AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan was already suffering from decades of war, drought and economic collapse prior to the Taliban takeover, but now U.N. officials have been warning of a much worse humanitarian crisis in the country with 23 million people facing hunger and nine million on the brink of starvation. Children are bearing the brunt of the crisis. The U.N. warned that if urgent humanitarian assistance is not provided, more than a million children will die from malnutrition. The BBC spoke to a mother whose two severely malnourished children were hospitalized.

    MOTHER: [translated] The pain that he is suffering, I also feel it. Only God knows what I go through when I look at him. Two of my children are facing death because we don’t have any money. I want the world to help Afghan people. I don’t want any other mother to see their children suffering like this.

    AMY GOODMAN: Just some of the voices of Afghanistan. Jan Egeland, as Juan just pointed out, when the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s government, the country suddenly lost access to $9 billion in Central Bank reserves, frozen by the Biden administration. For those countries that are saying, “We will not support the Taliban so we will not give money,” what do you say to them?

    JAN EGELAND: I say “Correct.” Money should not go to the military political group called the Taliban that took power by force. The money should go to the people, and it is possible. Number one, there has to be trust funds, as we call it, that is held by UN agencies, that funnel money directly to the hospitals that you just showed where people are dying at the moment. It can go straight to the teachers that were on the payroll of the World Bank previously. It can go straight to them. The money can go through us, international organizations, straight to the people. Secondly, unfreeze those funds that will enable banks to function again. At the moment, we cannot even buy relief items in Afghanistan. We have to ship them over, take them over from Pakistan and Iran which means that employment is dying in Afghanistan. Thirdly, donors, come down from the fence. See that we are there. We are reliable channels for funding. The money will go to the people. Transmit funding, not just come with pledges. This will not become Switzerland in a long time. You have to share the risk with us to save lives this winter.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, isn’t it in the interest of NATO and the Western nations that were in Afghanistan to assure some kind of an orderly government in Afghanistan? Because if the Taliban are not able to deliver basic services to their people, doesn’t that give the possibility for the rise of even more extremist groups within the country, like ISIS?

    JAN EGELAND: That could well be. But anyhow, I would argue that nobody wants an implosion in Afghanistan where 40 million people see “I have no hope here. I need to leave.” People would then use the neighboring countries as a segue, a channel to go elsewhere, including to Europe where we have worked ourselves up in a hysteria for a very few thousand migrants on the Polish-EU border. Hundreds of thousands have now assembled at the Iranian-Afghan border on the Afghan side with the intent to get over. Iranian refugees I spoke to said, “All our relatives have started to wander.” They want to come to Iran and they want to wander towards Europe. So it is in everybody’s interest to stabilize things in Afghanistan, and I just listed the three things that can be done. It is not rocket science. It has to happen tomorrow. We have no time really before the massive death starts.

    AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to turn to Hassan Esfandiar of the Iranian Red Crescent, who spoke to Al Jazeera about the difficulties of providing assistance to the thousands of Afghans you just described arriving at the border every day.

    HASSAN ESFANDIAR: Due to the current situation of sanctions to the country, unfortunately we are not able or we were not able to receive the international donations assistance because the banking channels are blocked and then we are not able to receive the humanitarian donations. So far, the Iran Red Crescent has tried to provide its own resources for the Afghan displaced populations who are approaching the border. As it is mentioned by your colleagues in the report, the average number of the populations who are approaching the Iranian borders are between 2,000 to 7,000 per day, so it’s a huge number.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, of course the U.S. has sanctions against Iran, so how can Iran be helped in dealing with this number of refugees that are crossing the border, 4,000 or 5000 every day? What is getting the West’s attention is what is happening in Eastern Europe. Earlier today, Polish border guards firing tear gas, water cannons at hundreds of asylum-seekers trying to push their way through a razor-wire barrier erected along the Poland-Belarus border. That’s 4,000 to 5,000 refugees there altogether. What’s happening in Iran is every day. If you could address both, from Iran to Poland-Belarus border?

    JAN EGELAND: As a European, I’m ashamed at what is happening in our part of the world. What Belarus is doing by using vulnerable migrants like chess pawns in some kind of a power play, and then Europe basically saying, “We’re not going to hear any asylum applications at all” in violation of international law. “We’re going to throw everybody out.” Then migrants in some kind of a stalemate with the Army on either side, wanting them to go in opposing directions. That is Europe with a few thousand. In Iran, we are having between three and a half and four million Afghans at the moment. Three and a half to four million. I think that has to be sunk in — 4,000 or 5,000 more per day, and a very small international aid program.

    Again, the United Nations is there with UNHCR. They’re a refugee agency. NRC is there. We can do more. We need more funding. We also ask for more freedom of operation from the Iranian authorities so we can win this race against the winter on both sides of the border, inside Afghanistan but also in Iran and in Pakistan. It has to be understood that a lot is at stake. It is not a small catastrophe. It is 23 million people who have no more food. They will wander. I would go if I was in that situation. I would also wander to where I could get food for my children.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jan Egeland, the particular role of the United States in all of this as being the primary power that led the war in Afghanistan for so many years and then the Biden administration suddenly pulling out — what would you urge the Biden administration to do now?

    JAN EGELAND: The U.S. should lead, really, as it has in the military political project of the last 20 years, should lead in the humanitarian relief operation. Unfreeze the assets that is necessary to get the public sector going. The World Bank sits on funds. When I wrote to the World Bank president, the answer back was, “Well, we’re willing to do things if the member states on our board, the U.S. and others, tell us to release money. We can’t release money.” It is sitting there for teachers and nurses and hospitals and whatnot in Afghanistan.

    Also, enable us as organizations to really work effectively and efficiently on both sides of the border. Iran sanction is making it difficult for us to work to some extent. The Norwegian Refugee Council couldn’t even transfer money for a full year after the Trump administration started these sanctions because there was no bank with a backbone strong enough to transfer aid money to our people because they were so afraid of one day coming in court in New York because of the potential break of these sanctions. It is paralyzing for us who are on the front lines of humanity.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, the U.N. Climate Summit just wrapped up in Glasgow with a significantly weakened pact that activists, scientists, many governments say falls far short of what is needed to avert a climate catastrophe. You tweeted, “This deal is better than no deal, but far from achieving climate justice and avert disaster displacements. There are too many carbon spewing spoilers among the negotiators. The fight must now be taken to each and every big polluter.” Name names. Talk specifically about what has to be done and how the climate catastrophe generates climate refugees.

    JAN EGELAND: I would start actually by going to those who intend to burn a lot of coal now that will lead to — and Afghanistan and Iran, that we are talking about, have both massive droughts at the moment. It is climate change-fueled. Really it is the major industrialized nations that has to do most, including China and now India, that are carbon-spewing and plan to spew out much more carbon in the coming years. We have to call a spade a spade. Look at where the emissions come from and it all has to come dramatically down. Afghans, they emit nothing really, and they are the first to starve because of this. The economic chaos and the droughts have created chaos in Afghanistan. Same in the Sahel belt. I was in places like Burkina Faso and Negev [sp] and so on, and you see how vulnerable they are. They have not emitted anything, really, in recent decades and they are first and hardest hit.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jan Egeland, we want to thank you for being with us, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council. We will link to your piece in The New York Times, “Afghanistan Is Facing a Total Economic Meltdown.” Speaking to us from Oslo, Norway.

    Coming up, we look at the U.S.-China summit that took place last night and look more broadly at U.S.-China relations. We will speak to Alfred McCoy, his new book out today, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Military Defends Strikes on “Armed” Women and Children

    A US military spokesperson has defended a series of strikes on civilians in Syria, which killed 80 people including women and children, claiming they were in self-defense and that no disciplinary measures were necessary.

    The US military found itself at the center of controversy after the New York Times reported that it had covered up a 2019 strike on Syrian civilians which left at least 80 dead. After the report went viral, US officials finally acknowledged the casualties in a statement and claimed that 16 of those killed were allegedly Islamic State fighters and 4 were civilians.

    Upon being asked about the other 60 casualties, which apparently included women and children, US Central Command told the New York Times that it “was not clear” whether they were civilians “in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”

    On Sunday, a US Central Command spokesperson defended the strikes in a statement to the BBC, claiming they were in self-defense. Captain Bill Urban said the military could not “conclusively characterize the status of more than 60 other casualties,” because “multiple armed women and at least one armed child were observed in the video.”

    “The exact mixture of armed and unarmed personnel could not be conclusively determined,” Urban argued, hypothesizing however that it was “likely” a majority of the casualties “were also combatants at the time of the strike.”

    It is also highly likely that there were additional civilians killed by these two strikes

    Despite acknowledging that the strikes killed civilians, including women and children, Urban claimed their investigation concluded the strikes “were legitimate self-defence strikes” and that “no disciplinary actions were warranted.”

    According to the New York Times’ report, even US military officers were shocked and disturbed by the strikes, which they observed live from a drone camera feed, and some questioned whether the incident could be considered a war crime. The entire incident, however, was reportedly soon covered up and reports of the casualties were classified.

    The post US Military Defends Strikes on “Armed” Women and Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Duke and Duchess visit Afghan refugee at US, NJ military base.

    New Jersey

    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan met the Afghan refugees during a trip to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for their foundation Archewell, Mail-Online reported.

    More than 10,000 Afghans migrated after Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Refugees accommodated temporarily at a compound in the base as part of Task Force Liberty.

    Harry and Meghan also visited a English learning classroom full of children, and spoke to several pupils who practiced phrases such as ‘nice to meet you’.

    According to Mail Online, The couple were pictured pointing at their heads as they led the class in singing Head, Shoulders, Knees And Toes.

    Meghan was pictured holding up a red pen, as the children shouted out the English words for colors they were learning that day.

    At last, couple thanked the teachers in particular for their efforts, and reminded them to take care of their own mental health as well.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Court hears evidence UK Special Forces hid war crime evidence

    Elite UK soldiers may have covered up evidence of their war crimes, the High Court has heard. An Afghan who lost several family members during UK military operations has brought the case. MOD documents seem to show investigators kept the cases secret.

    The man known as Safiullah says four family members died at the hands of UK troops. The alleged murders happened in 2011 and the accused killers were members of the UK Special Forces. The new documents show remarkable details, including comments by concerned senior officers about the legality of killings.

    Safiullah claims the incidents weren’t investigated properly and his lawyers want the judge to order the MOD to release more documents.

    War crimes

    The alleged crimes saw 17 people killed by UK Special Forces in February 2011 over two days. The soldiers claimed they had taken captured men back into their houses to search. But the soldiers insist some captives then reached for hidden weapons and were killed in response.

    But senior officers mentioned in the documents do not appear to believe this. One colonel said the claims were “quite incredible”. Another officer said:

     I find it depressing it has come to this. Ultimately a massive failure of leadership.

    Controlled-access

    The court also heard the documents relating to the cases were kept locked away in a “controlled-access security compartment”.

    The court learned that one top officer said soldier’s stories contained “layers of implausibilities”, and that this made their claims “especially surprising and logic defying”.

    Even more shockingly, one officer spoke of execution-style killings of restrained captives:

    It was also indicated that fighting-age males were being executed on target inside compounds, using a variety of methods after they had been restrained. In one case it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual being killed with a pistol.

    Overseas Operations Act

    The allegations brought by Safiullah have made it to the courts. But thanks to the Tory’s Overseas Operations Act, other cases, especially those more than five years old (six years for civil cases), may never come to court. This means that older allegations from Iraq and Afghanistan are harder to pursue.

    Top Tories like ex-veterans minister Johnny Mercer have maintained the act was about stopping “vexatious” (illegitimate) allegations against the military. Opponents, like Amnesty International, disagree. Because, as it states:

    War crimes are still war crimes if they took place five years ago.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Army

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Afghan mosque blast leaves at least three killed and several wounded.

    Jalalabad,

    A blast at a mosque in Afghanistan rocks Nangarhar province, at least three people were killed and wounded more than 15 on Friday, a hospital official told news agency.

    The blast took place in Spin Ghar district of the eastern province, a active belt of Daesh group activity since August Taliban seized power.

    According to a Taliban official told to news agency that, “I can confirm a blast during Friday prayers inside a mosque in Spin Ghar district. There are casualties and fatalities.”

    The Afghan based Daesh group first emerged in Nangarhar in 2015 and has claimed responsibility for a series of bloody attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power.

    One of the latest attack in early November, Daesh fighters conducted the Kabul National Military Hospital, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 50.

    Earlier this year Deash attacks on two popular mosques with the ethnic minority Hazara community killed more than 120 people.

    .

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • The Foreign Policy Response to the Situation for Women in Afghanistan: From Optics to Effective Change?

    By Sarah Hellyer

    Women’s Rights as Rhetoric

    Concerns for the rights of Afghan women and girls were used to leverage support for the war in Afghanistan from start to finish. In her famous radio address at the beginning of the war, Laura Bush urged Western governments and the international community to amplify and protect the voice of Afghan women. Throughout the duration of the war, this sentiment was captured in the development of foreign policies which were notionally designed to facilitate women’s empowerment and prevent further curtailment of their rights.

    Yet much of the political support and resourcing behind these nominal policies began to dwindle as the war continued, resulting in a failure to secure meaningful change for Afghan women following the withdrawal of US and allied forces. Now, Afghan women and girls wait to see whether the international community is serious about promoting and securing their rights, or if concerns for their wellbeing were simply optics all along. 

    The frustration that Afghan women feel towards the ineffective, optics-driven policy response of the international community is summarised in the following quote from an Afghan human rights defender who spoke recently at a seminar on women and peace negotiations organised by the Castan Centre and Monash Centre for Gender Peace and Security:

    “…the other side of the story is the unfair position of the international community. While in statements and press releases and their tweets they talk about women’s rights, they think that women’s rights is a priority for them, that women are half of the society in Afghanistan; in reality they have not done much in terms of protection of especially women human rights defenders in Afghanistan.”  

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Feminist Foreign Policy – A New Framework for Securing Women’s Rights?

    In contrast to foreign policies which address the rights of women and gender equality as an isolated policy concern, such as those relied on by the US and other western countries throughout the war in Afghanistan, Feminist Foreign Policy takes a structural approach to securing the rights of women. Feminist foreign policy draws on critical feminist and race scholarship to create a policy framework that addresses and interrogates the global systems of patriarchal power which facilitate the military-industrial complex and perpetuate harms against women. It is also a framework which steps away from traditional forms of foreign policy which focus on military force and coercion, opting instead for policies which holistically address the human needs of the most vulnerable. Under a feminist foreign policy, the needs of women are central to all policy considerations and their engagement is required in all aspects of political and policy decision making.

    Feminist Foreign Policy is achieving groundswell amongst certain governments, as indicated by the establishment of a Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy which was formalised at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris in June this year.  While gender equality and the rights of women are playing an increasingly significant role within international foreign policy, only 8 countries, including Sweden and Canada have formally adopted a feminist foreign policy. Notably, Australia, the UK and the US are yet to implement a formal Feminist Foreign Policy. 

    Importantly, research has shown that when women are placed at the centre of foreign policy concerns, meaningful outcomes can be achieved which go beyond optics or gestures. In particular, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that peace agreements which engage civil society and women’s organisations are 64% less likely to fail.[1] Further, studies indicate that when women participate in peace processes, the agreement reached is likely to be better implemented and more durable.[2] Moreover, it has also been found that societies with higher levels of gender equality are less prone to conflict both between and within states.[3] Addressing the need for women engagement in peace talks in the Afghan context, a joint brief from UN Women and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission notes that: 

    “….in a context where conflict recidivism remains high around the world, the inclusion of women in peace processes, and ceasefires negotiations in particular, may result in the long-term sustainability of the agreement—and of peace itself.”

    Yet despite the evidence that women’s engagement in peace talks leads to better foreign policy outcomes, there were only four women in the Afghan government’s 21-person negotiation team at the Doha negotiations, and no women delegates representing the Taliban.

    The following quote from an Afghan human rights defender at the Women and Peace seminar highlights the need for women to be meaningfully engaged in foreign policy as opposed to symbolic inclusion:

    “I think what the major problem is, is giving a symbolic role to Afghan women. Even if it’s a ministerial position, whether it’s an ambassador position, whether you are holding a senior position, whether you are in the negotiation team … women are mostly given symbolic roles. It’s more about numbers, not about meaningful participation of women, it’s not about women making decisions, it’s not about women influencing the decisions.”

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Similarly, this Afghan commentator at the same seminar addresses a key concern of feminist foreign policy, namely that peace-negotiation frameworks should holistically incorporate women instead of being limited to the realm of military and combat, which is primarily the ambit of men:

    “The belief in Afghanistan is that men fought, so they have to also bring peace. Because men have been leading the war in Afghanistan, they believe that they … have the responsibility to discuss peace in Afghanistan. I have witnessed different forums where, you know, men have said ‘why should we bring in women? What woman has to do [here]? We know the war, so we will know the peace also.”  

    [Speaker’s identity withheld for security reasons]

    Feminist Foreign Policy in the Wake of the Withdrawal

    Canada and Sweden are two countries that fought in Afghanistan whilst having a feminist foreign policy framework in place. Sweden was the first country to introduce a feminist foreign policy back in 2014. Ann Bernes, Director and Special Advisor on Women, Peace and Security at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, has said that Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is about moving gender equality from being an issue that competes amongst other priorities to being “the absolute core and DNA of… everything we do.”  The rights and resources of women in Afghanistan has been a key focus of Swedish feminist foreign policy, with Afghanistan being the largest recipient country of Swedish development assistance since 2013.

    Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, which was introduced in 2017, takes a holistic approach to the aims of feminist foreign policy, addressing not just issues of equality and rights recognition but also women’s engagement with and disruption of existing power structures. An example of a project instituted under Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy in Afghanistan was the Amplify Change: Supporting Women’s Rights project aimed at promoting women’s and girls’ rights by increasing awareness of existing rights under the law and by enhancing women’s and girls’ access to services and support.”                                              

    Yet while both Canada and Sweden have established feminist foreign policy programming efforts during the occupation of Afghanistan, there has been little indication from either country about how these efforts will continue following the withdrawal of allied forces that has occurred this year. In a statement following their withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Swedish government has said:

    “Under the development assistance strategy, Sweden was due to contribute almost SEK 3.3 billion between 2021 and 2024. Following the Taliban takeover, Sweden will have to redirect parts of this assistance.”

    This raises the question of how countries such as Sweden and Canada will continue to proceed with their feminist foreign policy approach following withdrawal. It also raises questions as to whether the current iterations of these country’s feminist policies can effectively address the needs of Afghan women. Importantly, a growing number of feminist foreign policy advocates argue that any form of military intervention is incommensurate with the goal of furthering women’s rights, given the violent patriarchal structures which are imbedded within the military.

    Where to from here?

    For many advocates, the withdrawal of troops provides an opportunity for the US and allied countries to instigate a total paradigm shift within their foreign policies that facilitates a non-military solution to the situation in Afghanistan through a commitment to peace building. For Lara Kiswani, the executive director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Centre (a member of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance), this involves adopting the principles of ‘feminist democracy’ whereby intersectionality and self-determination are pioneered, and economic and political power is redistributed.

    In any case, the international community waits to see whether the withdrawal of the US and its NATO allies truly signifies the end of (albeit perfunctory) efforts to empower women in Afghanistan, or whether this juncture presents an opportunity to revise current foreign policies and adopt a substantive feminist framework.

    References

    [1] Desirée Nilsson (2012) Anchoring the Peace: Civil Society Actors in Peace Accords and Durable  Peace, International Interactions, 38:2, 243-266, DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2012.659139.

    [2] Jana Krause, Werner Krause & Piia Bränfors (2018) Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace, International Interactions, 44:6, 985-1016, DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2018.1492386.

    [3] Hudson, Valerie M., Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott, and Chad F. Emmett. “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States.” Quarterly Journal: International Security, vol. 33. no. 3. (Winter 2008/09): 7-45.

    Sarah Hellyer is completing a double degree in a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University.  She is currently undertaking the Monash Afghanistan Support Clinic set up by the Monash Faculty of Law’s Clinical Education Program to support the Ham diley Campaign. The Campaign is an initiative started byPhD students Azadah Raz Mohammad (Melbourne University) and Karin Frodé (Monash University, Castan Centre Affiliate) and CEO of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, Simone Abel, that seeks to support Afghans at risk by providing research and advocacy support, as well as by leveraging trusted contacts to make referrals for evacuation.

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    This post was originally published on Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.