Tajikistan has deployed additional troops along its southern border with Afghanistan after Afghan authorities claimed a group of militants from Tajikistan played a major role in the Taliban’s capture of an Afghan district last month.
Afghan officials said the majority of the militants who overran the Maymay district in the northeastern Badakhshan Province in November were foreign fighters, including militants from Tajikistan.
They said the fighters belong to Jamaat Ansarullah, a militant group founded in Afghanistan by Tajik national Amriddin Tabarov in 2010.
In early December, a 10-minute video appeared on social media purportedly showing Tajik insurgents fighting against Afghan government forces in Maymay, which borders Tajikistan.
While RFE/RL cannot verify the authenticity of the footage, some of the fighters can be heard speaking a distinct Persian dialect spoken in Tajikistan.
Footage depicts them killing men in Afghan Army uniforms and civilian clothes and setting fire to a building. At the end, the militants show off weapons and vehicles they purportedly seized from the Afghan troops.
Afghan authorities confirmed the killings and the destruction in Maymay. Media quoted local residents who said militants, “particularly the Tajiks,” killed and beheaded Afghan soldiers.
List Of Names
Afghan lawmaker Latif Pedram, a native of the area, published a list of names that he described as militants from Tajikistan who took part in the Maymay attack.
In Tajikistan, the security service has since identified at least 15 Tajik nationals whose faces or names appeared on videos and statements shared by Afghan officials in connection with the fall of Maymay.
It has raised alarms in Dushanbe, the sources said, because they are ordinary individuals with no apparent connections to any political, religious, or opposition groups. The sources — familiar with the situation — spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The presence of Tajik militants in Afghanistan and the volatile tribal areas of Pakistan has been known for many years. But the difference in previous cases is that the majority of them were taken to Afghanistan as children by their parents during the civil war of the 1990s or in the immediate postwar years. Many were born there to Tajik families.
In the latest cases, however, the Tajik militants are people who left the country between 2010 and 2017 — men mainly aged between 20 and 40 years, with some having brought their wives and children with them to Afghanistan.
A ‘Real Threat’
Tajik authorities haven’t commented publicly about the border reinforcements. They insist that it is business as usual when it comes to any threats posed by Afghan-based militants.
“It is a real threat. Today they’re fighting for the Taliban, but we can’t predict what they’re going to do in the future,” sources in Dushanbe told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said an elite unit had been deployed near the areas where Tajik fighters are thought to be concentrated on the Afghan side of the frontier.
Badakhshan Deputy Governor Akhtar Muhammad Khairzada told the Pajhwok news agency that the militants are mainly based in the province’s Warduj and Jurm districts. He added that there were also Uzbek, Chechen, and Chinese Uyghur militants based in the area.
Afghan officials estimate the number of Tajik militants in the country at around 200, but the exact figure is impossible to confirm. In 2019, the number of Jamaat Ansarullah members was estimated at around 30.
Aziz Barez, a former first secretary with the Afghan Embassy in Dushanbe, says only the Taliban “who hosts the foreign militants” can provide a more accurate number of how many Tajiks and other foreigners are fighting alongside them.
Citing intelligence gathered both by Afghan and Tajik officials, the sources in Dushanbe believe Jamaat Ansarullah militants operate separately from Tajik nationals who have joined an affiliate of the extremist Islamic State (IS) group in Afghanistan in recent years.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that Jamaat Ansarullah — along with the Taliban — had even been engaged in some fighting against IS followers in Afghanistan, the sources said.
But some think it is possible that the militant groups might join forces in the future.
Tabarov, the Jamaat Ansarullah founder, was killed by Afghan forces in July 2015 and his two sons were extradited to Tajikistan. In 2019, the sons were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for seeking to overthrow the government, among other charges.
In 2015-16, Tajikistan arrested dozens of suspected followers of the banned group. The extent of current support for Jamaat Ansarullah in Tajikistan is unknown.
If the claims by Badakhshan officials are reliable, the number of Tajik militants in the Afghan province has been on the rise recently.
Barez, the former diplomat who is from Badakhshan, says the potential security threats by the militants shouldn’t be underestimated.
“The militants have access to financial sources to fund themselves — such as by controlling lucrative drug-trafficking routes,” he told RFE/RL on December 16. “Also, the area is rich in natural resources like rubies, lapis lazuli, and gold.”
Families Under Fire
An anti-extremism campaign is in full swing in Tajikistan once again, with parents, siblings, and other close relatives of the militants appearing in video messages released by state-run channels. Parents are shown pleading with their children to come home and turn themselves in.
“People are telling me your son is shown on a video killing people. I wish I was dead rather than hearing this,” Zumratbi Rajabmatova tells her son, Daler Elmurodov.
“Please, come back home. Or if you don’t want to return then please live quietly and stop killing!” the tearful mother says in the video released by the government.
One father begs his son “not to fire a single shot toward Tajikistan.”
“We’re taking the blame for your crimes. If you attack and kill Tajik border guards, don’t you think that their loved ones would take your revenge on us?” another parent says in the video.
The mother of a suspected militant pleads with her son in a statement broadcast by Tajik state TV.
The families say their militant sons have left them to pay the price for their actions — they must endure shame and guilt in their communities and face interrogations and pressure from authorities.
“I’ve faced questioning [about my son] for the past six years. I’m fed up with being the mother of that son and have had enough of these interrogations,” one parent told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service on condition of anonymity.
The Tajik government has long been criticized for its clampdown on freedom of religion and tight controls on how people practice their faith in the predominantly Muslim country of some 9.5 million.
Women are banned from wearing the hijab, an Islamic head scarf, in public places. Young men are not allowed to grow long beards or wear certain clothes that are deemed to be in a Salafi style.
Mosques operate under strict state control, while imams are vetted and appointed by the government. Their sermons are also monitored.
Independent media has been stifled, and opposition parties face constant government pressure. People have also been deprived of an outlet to express their opinions or discontent.
Critics say this general lack of freedom in Tajikistan coupled with widespread poverty, skyrocketing unemployment, and corruption have pushed many young people to join Islamic extremist groups.
Thousands of Tajiks — many with their families — also went to Syria and Iraq to join IS forces.
Joe Biden will take command of the White House at a time when the American public is more concerned about battling coronavirus than fighting overseas wars. But America’s wars rage on regardless, and the militarized counterterrorism policy Biden has supported in the past—based on airstrikes, special operations and the use of proxy forces—is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.
In Afghanistan, Biden opposed Obama’s 2009 troop surge, and after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their war policy in other countries as well. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.”
In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning the large-scale deployment of U.S. forces, and relying instead on air strikes, drone strikes and special operations “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting and holding of territory.
In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to Al Qaeda. The forces they unleashed are still fighting over the spoils nine years later.
While Joe Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, at the time he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Colonel Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State College in October 2011 on the very day President Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”
While Biden has since washed his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was, in fact, emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war backed by airstrikes that he supported, and which he has yet to disavow. Biden still says he supports “counterterrorism” operations, but he was elected president without ever publicly answering a direct question about his support for the massive use of airstrikes and drone strikes that are an integral part of that doctrine.
In the campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped over 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing major cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians. When Biden said America “didn’t lose a single life” in Libya, he clearly meant “American life.” If “life” simply means life, the war in Libya obviously cost countless lives, and made a mockery of a UN Security Council resolution that approved the use of military force only to protect civilians.
As Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP as the U.S. unleashed its “Shock and Awe” bombardment on Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” The same obviously applies to people in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and wherever American bombs have been falling for 20 years.
As Obama and Trump both tried to pivot from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump administration has branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War, the war on terror has stubbornly refused to exit on cue. Al Qaeda and Islamic State have been driven from places the U.S. has bombed or invaded, but keep reappearing in new countries and regions. Islamic State now occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Other Al Qaeda affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to eleven countries in West Africa.
After nearly 20 years of “war on terror,” there is now a large body of research into what drives people to join Islamist armed groups fighting local government forces or Western invaders. While American politicians still wring their hands over what twisted motives can possibly account for such incomprehensible behavior, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. Most fighters are not motivated by Islamist ideology as much as by the desire to protect themselves, their families or their communities from militarized “counterterrorism” forces, as documented in this report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
Another study, titled The Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment, found that the tipping point or “final straw” that drives over 70% of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by “counterterrorism” or “security” forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling policy that fuels an intractable cycle of violence by generating and replenishing an ever-expanding pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities and countries.
For example, the U.S. formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with 11 West African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into it. In a recent report from Burkina Faso, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that confirm how 15 years of U.S.-led “counterterrorism” have only fueled an explosion of terrorism across West Africa.
The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that the 1,000 violent incidents involving militant Islamist groups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the past year amount to a seven-fold increase since 2017, while the confirmed minimum number of people killed has increased from 1,538 in 2017 to 4,404 in 2020
Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location Event Data), told Turse that, “Focusing on Western concepts of counterterrorism and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.”
Indeed, even the New York Times has confirmed that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. A 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.
Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these abuses are the main factor driving the Fulani to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo. “So many people have been killed—assassinated—but there has been no justice.”
Since the inception of the Global War on Terror, both sides have used the violence of their enemies to justify their own violence, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of chaos spreading from country to country and region to region across the world.
But the U.S. roots of all this violence and chaos run even deeper than this. Both Al Qaeda and Islamic State evolved from groups originally recruited, trained, armed and supported by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Syria since 2011.
If the Biden administration really wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism in the world, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in destabilizing countries, supporting terrorism, spreading chaos and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been well documented since the 1970s by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, William Blum, Gareth Porter and others.
The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone program and protected CIA torturers, to be his Director of National Intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and yet it is vital.
The new Biden administration needs to take a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and the insidious role the CIA has played in so many of them.
We hope Biden will finally renounce hare-brained, militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions, and that he will instead invest in humanitarian and economic aid that really helps people to live more peaceful and prosperous lives.
We also hope that Biden will reverse Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War and prevent the diversion of more of our country’s resources to a futile and dangerous arms race with China and Russia.
We have real problems to deal with in this century – existential problems that can only be solved by genuine international cooperation. We can no longer afford to sacrifice our future on the altar of the Global War on Terror, a New Cold War, Pax Americana or other imperialist fantasies.
The 130-kilometer line running from Khaf in northeastern Iran into Rosnak in the western Afghan province of Herat is seen as providing a crucial transport link for the landlocked country where decades of war have hindered infrastructure development.
The link is to be eventually expanded by 85 kilometers to reach the city of Herat.
The $75 million Khaf-Herat railway project began in 2007, with Tehran funding construction on both sides of the border.
Speaking during the inauguration ceremony, held via videoconference due to the coronavirus pandemic, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the project was important not only for Afghanistan and Iran but also for the entire region.
Iran’s President Hassan Rohani said it was “one of the historic days” in relations between the two neighbors.
The ceremony saw cargo trains depart from opposite ends of the line, a week after a shipment of cement was sent from Iran to Afghanistan by train, inaugurating the railway link project.
Iran seeks to become a regional transport hub, allowing Afghanistan and other landlocked countries in the region to ship goods to its ports on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
When French president Emmanuel Macron was pilloried in some quarters for defending freedom of expression as a French value, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison backed his European counterpart: “We share values. We stand for the same things.” This professed French/Australian value for freedom of expression has now come back to bite the backside of the Australian prime minister.
When it comes to publication of inflammatory western depictions of the prophet Mohammed that raise the ire of many Muslims worldwide, many western voices will step forth to defend freedom of expression. However, this fidelity to the freedom of expression will often change when what is being expressed casts the West in a negative light; a case in point being an image of an Australian soldier slitting a Muslim child’s throat.
News.com.au featured a 60 Minutes Australia report about “disturbing allegations of the murder of children and a ‘killing as a sport’ culture” among Australian fighters deployed in Afghanistan.
A sociologist, Samantha Crompvoets, spent months interviewing Special Forces soldiers about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Among the insouciant acts noted were soldiers tallying their kills on wall boards — kills that included civilians and prisoners.
60 Minutes described the killers as a “rogue band” of special forces soldiers. One especially “disturbing allegation” described how Australian Special Forces soldiers mercilessly slit the throats of 14-year-old boys, bagged their bodies, and tossed them in a river.
A Guardianexclusive exposed depravity with a photo of an Australian soldier drinking beer from a Taliban fighter’s prosthetic leg.
The findings by Crompvoets and the 60 Minutes report were corroborated by the Australian government’s redacted Brereton Report of “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”:
… 39 unlawful killings by or involving ADF members. The Report also discloses separate allegations that ADF members cruelly treated persons under their control. None of these alleged crimes was committed during the heat of battle. The alleged victims were non-combatants or no longer combatants.
What particularly stuck in the craw of political Australia was a tweet by a Chinese official, Zhao Lijian, of a gruesome throat-slitting image.
Australian prime minister Morrison was apoplectic, calling the post “repugnant,” “deeply offensive to every Australian, every Australian who has served in that uniform,” “utterly outrageous,” and unjustifiable noting that it was a “false image.” Morrison demanded an apology from the Chinese government, the firing of Zhao Lijian, and for Twitter to remove the post.
“It is utterly outrageous and cannot be justified on any basis whatsoever, the Chinese Government should be totally ashamed of this post,” Morrison said.
First, calling the image false is deflection because anyone who gives more than a cursory glance to the image will right away realize that it is has been photo-shopped and does not purport in any way to be an untouched photograph.
Second, the Australian prime minister obviously has backward moral priorities. I submit that what should be deeply offensive to Morrison and every human being being — not just Australians — and especially offensive for every Australian who has served in the Australian military are the egregious war crimes committed by those wearing the same uniform. The starting and focal point for condemnation must be the war crimes. Logically, if the spate of gruesome war crimes had not been committed by Australians in uniform, then outcry at the crimes would not have been filliped.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying did address the outrage by Morrison in a TV address.
“These cruel crimes have been condemned by the international community,” said Hua.
“The Australian government should do some soul searching and bring the culprits to justice, and offer an official apology to the Afghan people and make the solemn pledge that they will never repeat such crimes. Earlier, they said the Chinese government should feel ashamed but it is Australian soldiers who committed such cruel crimes.”
“Shouldn’t the Australian government feel ashamed? Shouldn’t they feel ashamed for their soldiers killing innocent Afghan civilians?”
According to Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani, Morrison did express — not a full-fledged apology — but “his deepest sorrow over the misconduct by some Australian troops.” Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne also wrote to her Afghan counterpart to extend “apologies for the misconduct identified by the inquiry, by some Australian military personnel in Afghanistan.” The wording would seem to diminish the atrocities as “misconduct.” There is also a overarching emphasis that the crimes were committed by some troops, seeking to exculpate the bulk of the troops from bad apples among them.
It would seem Australia is trying to distract from its horrendous war crimes. Colloquially put, Australia’s political honcho is trying to cover the military’s bare ass.
World Socialist Web Site was scathing in denouncing the Australian Establishment’s response,
The tweet by a mid-ranking Chinese official, condemning Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, has been met with hysterical denunciations by the entire political and media establishment. The response can only be described as a staggering exercise in hypocrisy, confected outrage and an attempt to whip-up a wartime nationalist frenzy.
The illustration is based on an investigative report by the Australian Department of Defense, Hua pointed out, noting that “although it is a painting, it reflects the facts.”
Hua pointed to Morrison’s real purpose: to divert attention and shift pressure from Australian war crimes to criticism of China.
Australia Liberal MP Andrew Hastie preferred that the war crimes had been kept buried. Hastie (who as a captain in the Special Air Services was cleared of wrongdoing in an investigation into soldiers under his command who chopped the hands off dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan) criticized the Australian Defence Force for releasing allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, saying it has allowed China to malign Australian troops.
Bipartisan support was forthcoming for Australian government indignation as Labor leader Anthony Albanese also criticized the image and shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong called it “gratuitous” and “inflammatory.”
Prosecuting Western War Crimes
At the end of World War II war crimes tribunals were set up. In Europe there was the Nuremberg Tribunal and in Asia the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. It was victor’s justice and no Allies were tried. This although the United States and, to a lesser degree France, engaged in a deliberate policy of starving German prisoners of war (who the US re-designated as disarmed enemy forces to evade the Geneva Conventions on POWs, as president George W Bush would later similarly do in Afghanistan when he refused to recognize POWs, labeling them instead as unlawful enemy combatants) and civilians. Germans stated that over 1,700,000 soldiers alive at the end of the war never returned home.
In the Far East, there were no allies prosecuted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. It must be noted that just as Nazi scientists were brought back to work at the behest of the US, class A Japanese war criminals were also protected by the US from prosecution.
Australia is not alone in the commission of war crimes. Canadian Airborne Regiment troops tied and blind-folded 16-year-old Shidane Arone, beat him with a metal bar, and burned with cigarellos for hours (he was later found to have burns on his penis), and took “trophy pics.” Arone was dead the following morning. The Canadian Airborne Regiment would be disbanded. US war crimes are numerous. They include My Lai in Viet Nam, Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, etc.
Western war criminals are seldom punished, or when punished, then not in a meaningful way proportionate to the crimes committed. In fact, if you expose the war crimes perpetrated by a western allied country, then you risk becoming targeted for imprisonment. Such is the situation that Julian Assange finds himself in today. Although an Australian citizen, Morrison has been unsympathetic to the WikiLeaks founder and publisher who exposed egregious US war crimes. Said Morrison, “Mr Assange will get the same support that any other Australian would … he’s not going to be given any special treatment.”
This is what adherence to the tenet of freedom of expression genuinely signifies in much of the western world. In other words, freedom of expression is good for the western goose but bad when it is for the Muslim gander.
*****
For further background view the damning allegations of serious war crimes, including the execution of innocent civilians and detainees.
If one were to get into the head of Australian government MP Andrew Hastie, a security tangle of woe would no doubt await. Having been a captain with the Special Air Services and having also served in Afghanistan, he has been none too thrilled by the publicity soldiers he served with have received. The report by New South Wales Court of Appeal Justice Paul Brereton has now been mandatory reading (or skimming) for political and military watchers. Known rather dully as the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, it makes the claim that 39 alleged murders were inflicted on non-combatants by Australian special service units when operating in Afghanistan.
Of interest is where the report goes from here. A fair guess is that it will not venture too far into waters of reform. Hastie, for one, would have preferred it never to have been published, or at least not released in the “imperfect” way it was. He takes particular issue with the connected work of consultant Samantha Crompvoets, a sociologist commissioned by the Special Operations Commander of Australia (SOCAUST) to conduct a “cultural review” of the Special Operations Command in mid-2015.
In many ways, the work of Crompvoets, which is drawn upon and referenced heavily by the Brereton Inquiry itself, is more significant. It is less tightly hemmed by qualifications and speaks to the broader tactics and methods of Australia’s Special Forces. In her January 2016 report, she refers to body count competitions and the use of the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL). Euphemised for battle, the JPEL effectively constituted a “sanctioned kill list” with numbers that were massaged.
She notes methods of war common to counter-insurgency operations during the Cold War. From Algeria to Vietnam, those who often came off second best were villagers for the butchering. Slaughtered villagers were often designated “squirters” when fleeing the arrival of Special Forces via helicopter. Excuses were concocted for the generous bloodletting: the squirters “were running away from us to their weapons caches”.
Clearance operations would also be used after the initial massacre. The village would be cordoned off; the men and boys taken to guesthouses. They would be bound up. Torture would ensue for days. These men and boys would then be found dead, shot in the head or have their throats slit.
In one instance, Crompvoets notes soldiers of the SASR driving along a road and sighting two 14-year-old boys. The soldiers quickly concluded they had come across Taliban sympathisers. The boys were stopped and seized. Their throats were slit. Their bodies were bagged and discarded in a river. Such occurrences were not infrequent; Special Force soldiers would commit such unsanctioned killings as a means of bonding, to “get a name for themselves”.
The death of the two Afghan boys has now become the stuff of diplomatic provocation. On November 30, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted a mocked up image of an Australian soldier ready to apply a blood soaked knife to the throat of an Afghan boy, holding a lamb. “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts & call for holding them accountable.”
This was too much for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who took issue with its repugnance. But for Hastie, it went further. Australia, he claimed in his speech to fellow parliamentarians on December 3, had let its guard slip. His springboard was an opinion piece by Alan Jones, that most opinionated of broadcasters, less focused on the tweeted image than the prime minister’s reaction to it. “When will you,” bellowed Jones, “apologise for your language and that of your Generals that condemned all our men in Afghanistan, the best of the best, to the charge of criminal behaviour from a report you haven’t read and before any of them have access to the full weight of the law?’
For Jones, innocence had been impugned by Australia’s political and military leaders. China has simply furnished the Morrison government with suitable headlines of distraction, to “have them off the hook” even as Australia’s soldiers were being defamed.
Hastie’s speech advanced a few points. He spoke approvingly of Morrison’s response to Beijing. He then embraced a tactic of minimisation: the alleged atrocities were localised, select. Australia was “seeking to be honest and accountable for alleged wrongdoing by a small number of individuals entrusted to wear our flag.” He also attacked the work of Crompvoets and the author herself. The grounds of contention were various: the appearance of the author on 60 Minutes four days prior to the release of the Brereton Report; the leak of her report two weeks prior to the publication of the Inquiry’s findings; the decision to release the unredacted Crompvoets report alongside the redacted Brereton Report.
“The Crompvoets report detailed unproven rumours of Australian soldiers murdering Afghan children. It may have prompted the Brereton Report, but its evidentiary threshold was far lower. The Brereton report neither rules these rumours in or out. So why are they out in the open for our adversaries to use against us?” Doing so had “undermined public confidence in the process and allowed the People’s Republic of China to malign our troops.”
Hastie’s speech has a throbbing subtext: containment. Despite professing a belief in the rule of law and transparency, the overwhelming sense from the politician who chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security is that the Inquiry should have been kept indoors. Such bloodied laundry should never have been aired. That, at the very least, would have avoided public discussions about the egregious methods of Australia’s elite warriors, and the decisions behind deploying them in the first place.
Much complaint can be had of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report. It exempts political actors of responsibility for alleged atrocities and war crimes. It suggests that those in the highest echelons of the Australian Defence Forces are ignorant in incompetent innocence. It spares the desk warriors and flays the field operatives. Heavily redacted, this document suggests that no serious cleansing of the Augean stables is going to take place any time soon.
One recommendation in the report does stand out for its logical decency. “Perhaps the single most effective indication that there is a commitment to cultural reform is the demonstration that those who have been instrumental in the exposure of misconduct, or are known to have acted with propriety and probity, are regarded as role models.”
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who the people being recommended for promotion or pardon are, their names furiously blacked out in the public version of the report. But hints can be gathered from the explicit reference to the role played by whistleblowers. “Too often, not only in the military, have the careers of whistleblowers been adversely affected.”
One such whistleblower is Major David McBride, who once cut his teeth as a military lawyer and participated in two deployments to Afghanistan. Between 2014 and 2016, McBride passed on information to the ABC on alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers. It began with the gathering of files from computers located in the joint-operations headquarters near Bungendore, east of the nation’s capital. A report documenting alleged atrocities by special forces in Afghanistan came into being, though it bulked to cover the mishandling of sex abuse allegations within the military, and the treatment of women in the armed forces. Avenues of internal disclosure were used, and exhausted. McBride even sought to tempt the Australian Federal Police. No one bit.
In 2017, the material gathered by McBride became the trove of documents and revelations called The Afghan Files. They were disturbing, enlightening, and did much to expose the whole sordid business of committing special forces to such theatres of war as Afghanistan. But McBride’s view on the information was more panoramic and less specifically focused on the minutiae of brutality. Australia’s special forces, he suggested in what can only be regarded as an eternal theme, were scapegoats for desk bound commanders and bureaucrats. While soldiers killed and bled in the field, the pen pushers back in Canberra thrived. “It’s a real sickness we need to work on,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in June 2019. “Everyone has an opinion poll. No one wants to make a decision.”
In that sense, McBride remains conventional, keen on proper process, and far from a garlanded peacenik. He stares at officialdom, finds them wanting: they want to send soldiers to war, but in doing so, hobble them. “If you are worried about Afghan deaths, why not pull us out? If you want us to fight the war, you have to be able to let us do it.”
For his deeds, McBride faces five charges centred on theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and disclosing information without due authorisation. In a preliminary hearing in 2019, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.
His case has put a few Australian parliamentarians in a sour mood, though not those of the major parties, who remain characteristically cowed and cowardly on such subjects. The well-meaning and often sound independent MP Andrew Wilkie is entirely clear about what should happen to McBride. “The federal government must stop going after whistleblowers who risk everything to reveal what happens in dark corners.” To that end, the government “must drop all charges against Mr McBride.”
Senator Rex Patrick, another independent, has also urged the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to drop the charges. McBride “is a hero” and in the absence of the CDPP failing to drop the case, “the Attorney-General should order the discontinuance of the prosecution under the powers afforded him by section 71(1) of the Judiciary Act.”
Nick Xenophon, law partner of the firm representing McBride and himself a former federal parliamentarian, is also a standard bearer for whistleblowers. In an open letter to the chief of the Australian Defence Forces, General Angus Campbell, he argued that it was only “whistleblowers like McBride and a handful of others who made the Brereton report possible by refusing to be intimidated into silence. In my view, they have redeemed the reputation of our nation. They do not deserve jail cells.”
The answer supplied by General Campbell was nothing if not predictable. When called upon to have a view on the subject of McBride’s liability, he retreated to the bunker of dispassionate propriety. “I can’t speak to issues at play in a current court process,” he explained to the press last month. “I am not in a position to do so. I understand your concern and I appreciate that many here will speak to that issue, but I am not able to talk to it.”
A petition started by Afghan Australian lawyer Arezo Safi, is bustling away to its intended target of 50,000. (To date 38,552 have signed it.) “As an Afghan-Australian and a lawyer, I am deeply upset by the persecution of David McBride, the brave whistleblower who exposed Australian Defence Force’s war crimes in Afghanistan.” Democracy, she claims, is at stake without the exploits of McBride and his like.
Support is also forthcoming from the Afghan Community Support Organisation of New South Wales. In commending the efforts and findings of the investigation, its president Nadir Azami wanted the government to “go all the way and finish this goodwill and drop charges against Mr McBride”. Doing so would show “good intention” in supporting future whistleblowers.
Safi is dedicated in her advocacy for McBride, certain that he is “being celebrated for his bravery by the general public.” But the approach to whistleblowers in Australia is at best fickle. The system of protections are perniciously poor for those exposing national security information. The best McBride can hope for at this point are sensible decisions made by the CDPP based on the public interest, a concept regularly used against, rather than for, the whistleblower.
Should the matter ultimately wind its way to the Attorney-General Christian Porter, advocates for McBride will have every reason to be perturbed. Porter is a dreary authoritarian who relishes the prosecutor’s garb. He has already given a clue to fellow parliamentarians on what members of the public can expect. Intervening in the McBride case “would be utterly extraordinary and would necessarily, by its very nature, represent political intervention in a process which has conventionally been independent.”
A report presented to NATO foreign ministers on December 1 says the alliance must adapt to deal with new threats, including “persistently aggressive Russia” and “the rise of China.”
The ministers received the report on the first day of a two-day conference being held via videolink as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that the ministers also discussed the Russian “military buildup” around the alliance, as well as its mission in Afghanistan.
The Western military alliance “will have to take some hard decisions” about the mission when NATO defense ministers meet in February, he said.
The 67-page report makes about 140 suggestions on how to reboot the alliance, which it says “must adapt to meet the needs of a more demanding strategic environment.”
It notes that while NATO faced one big threat during the Cold War it now faces two “systemic rivals” – Russia and China – along with “the enduring threat of terrorism.”
It also suggests the Western military alliance find a way to stop individual countries vetoing policy decisions, as Hungary has done over plans for a deeper partnership with non-NATO member Ukraine.
Other recommendations include creating a consultative body to coordinate broader, Western policy toward China, holding summits with European Union leaders, and giving the secretary-general more power over personnel and budgets.
“NATO needs a strong political dimension to match its military adaptation,” according to the report, whose suggestions are not binding.
The document is to be presented to NATO leaders at a summit planned for next year. They could be included in an update to NATO’s Strategic Concept document, which dates from 2010 and sought to consider Russia as a partner.
Speaking to reporters, Stoltenberg said the ministers discussed “Russia’s continued military buildup in our neighborhood, as well as arms control.”
He said NATO is adapting its deterrence posture “to address Russia’s destabilizing actions,” but the ministers agree that they must continue to pursue dialogue with Russia.
They also expressed support for preserving limitations of nuclear weapons and for developing a more comprehensive arms control regime, and welcomed dialog between Russia and the United States ahead of the expiration of their bilateral New START treaty in February.
“We should not find ourselves in a situation where there is no agreement regulating the number of nuclear warheads,” he said.
On Afghanistan, Stoltenberg said NATO supports the peace process while remaining committed to the mission to help Afghanistan fight terrorism.
But he added: “As we continue to assess the situation in Afghanistan, it is clear that we will face a turning point early next year.”
The security alliance risks and even longer-term engagement if the NATO mission stays in Afghanistan, and if it leaves there is a risk that it will become a safe haven for international terrorists again, Stoltenberg said.
“So, there is a price for staying longer, but there is also a price for leaving too soon,” he said.
NATO now has about 11,000 troops from dozens of countries stationed in the country. Their mandate is to help train and advise Afghanistan’s own national security forces.
But the presence of U.S. forces, which NATO relies on for air support, transport, and logistics, is scheduled to shrink by 2,000 troops to 2,500 by January 15.
Under a peace deal reached between the United States and the Taliban, all foreign troops should leave Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 if security conditions on the ground permit.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, and RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX
Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine right to rule
In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic system imaginable.
Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of empire
There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the life blood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.
My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world https://t.co/uU2G6i821I
US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.
Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.
The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.
Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.
Fog of war
For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.
The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent austerity
All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an extra £16.5 billion in “defence” spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released this week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.
To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.
New salesman needed
The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us this week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to further manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.
Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the US and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric US wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.
Obama-style facelift
Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence” or peace – are still the core western mission.
That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, may have been shocked to learn this week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.
REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.
The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.
Ideological alchemy
Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.
Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https://t.co/0fLC8TKnzm
The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.
But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.
Crushed or tamed
Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.
Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.
First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of colour.
But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath.
Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was concerned – occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.
The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.
Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and “espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
My latest: Julian Assange was on the front line of a war to remake journalism as a true check on the runaway power of government. Journalists had a chance to ally with him. Instead they served him up as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters https://t.co/oF2nPOix49
An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.
Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.
As a BBC documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.
‘Mutiny’ by the army
Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.
By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.
He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence” establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.
In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn’s own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.
Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”
My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU
Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to “run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.
In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added: “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”
Smears and Brexit
After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.
Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here,here and here.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.
By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.
Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra £16bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.
A Biden makeover
After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. The once-confident, youthful Wikileaks is now less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.
We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment.
There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushing for Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.
The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell yet more war to a war-weary public.
The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western populations – into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful resistance is provoked.
A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run out of fuel.
We meet an immigration judge who rejected nearly every asylum case that came before her, then follow a transgender woman as she tries to claim asylum. Finally, we go to Turkey, where young Afghan women are trying to leave their past behind.
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