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Category: Afghanistan

  • A New Cold War Won’t Help the People of Ukraine or Anyone Else

    Kyiv residents sit in tent set up after building is hit with shrapnel

    The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”

    “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”

    For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”

    Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”

    Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.

    But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.

    The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.

    Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.

    The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.

    Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.

    Unlike ordinary people around the world, foreign policy elites are not thinking primarily about the immediate needs of the Ukrainian people. If they were, the U.S. would be doing more to aid peace talks, cancel Ukraine’s onerous debt repayments to global banks and stop the denial of entry to Ukrainian refugees at the U.S. border.

    Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.

    Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.

    Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.

    To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.

    People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.

    For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”

    Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.

    More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.

    That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rights Without Bounds: An Interview with Wendy Brown

    The contemporary right has inherited two seemingly contradictory impulses from the neoliberal era: anti-democratic politics and a libertarian personal ethic.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People

    Who, really, is the War Criminal?

    So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq?  The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.

    Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:

    Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.

    Batinga also notes that:

    More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.

    BRIC’s Made of Straw

    The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.

    Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.

    India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.

    Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains

    The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

    China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?

    The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.

    Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.

    Hypocrisy

    Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:

    The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.

    The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.

    Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]

    Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.

    Tactics

    Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.

    You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.

    The post President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Second whistleblower says decision to evacuate animals from Afghanistan did come from PM

    A second Foreign Office whistleblower has backed up claims that Boris Johnson was directly involved in the decision to evacuate cats and dogs from Afghanistan.

    The evacuation of animals from the Nowzad charity sparked controversy last year as thousands trying to flee the Taliban after the fall of Kabul were left behind.

    But the Prime Minister has repeatedly denied he was directly involved in the decision to bring the animals out of the country, saying claims were “complete nonsense”, despite emails and whistleblower evidence suggesting the opposite.

    Further evidence

    Raphael Marshall, who worked for the Foreign Office at the time, previously gave evidence and revealed an email showing an official in Foreign Office minister lord Goldsmith’s private office telling colleagues on August 25 that “the PM has just authorised their staff and animals to be evacuated”.

    Now, a second Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) civil servant has given evidence to a Commons committee backing up his claims.

    Josie Stewart, who has worked for the FCDO since 2015 including for the British Embassy in Kabul, said she expected she would lose her job for the revelations.

    Stewart, a senior staff member, volunteered on the Afghanistan response and worked on the special cases team where those potentially eligible to come to the UK were assessed on an individual basis.

    She said:

    It was widespread ‘knowledge’ in the FCDO crisis centre that the decision on Nowzad’s Afghan staff came from the Prime Minister.

    Stewart told the Foreign Affairs Committee she:

    saw messages to this effect on Microsoft Teams, I heard it discussed in the crisis centre including by senior civil servants, and I was copied on numerous emails which clearly suggested this.

    Caught

    She said no one challenged this, including Nigel Casey, the Prime Minister’s special representative for Afghanistan.

    Casey has claimed that after checking his emails he “could not find any that referred to any prime ministerial intervention on the subject of Nowzad”.

    But Stewart said that “yet when I searched my emails for ‘PM’ and ‘Nowzad’ I found more than one email referencing ‘the PM’s decision on Nowzad’ and with Nigel Casey in copy”.

    Johnson and ministers have repeatedly denied that the PM had any involvement in the evacuation of the Nowzad animals from Kabul.

    Stewart, however, said civil servants had “intentionally lied” to the Commons committee. Stewart continued:

    It is possible, although it would be surprising, that neither (Foreign Office permanent under-secretary) Philip Barton nor Nigel Casey remembered seeing the emails about supposed PM involvement on the day they were sent.

    Stewart made it clear:

    I cannot see how it is possible that they would not have found the extensive evidence of this when asked about it later.

    She said in order to make his claim Casey must have either deleted his emails against instructions, did not know how to use the search function in email client Outlook, “found the emails but somehow concluded they were not relevant”, or “he was lying”.

    Lobbying

    Stewart also hit out at other aspects of the response to the Afghanistan crisis.

    She said the sheer amount of lobbying done by MPs on behalf of cases that had been highlighted to them meant

    that most of the focus of the special cases team was on tracking down correspondence or data on individuals with connections, when it could otherwise have been spent identifying and ensuring we helped the most vulnerable people.

    She said:

    We were all desperately trying to help people we knew. Doubtless I would have done the same, had I been in a position of political influence. But the cost and implications of this should not be overlooked.

    She also said there was confusion on who fit into which category for prioritisation, the rota was not fit for purpose with staff taking scheduling into their own hands.

    Stewart said there was “no central process or system for handling correspondence” with six inboxes she was aware of being used:

    The very existence of some mailboxes was forgotten about entirely between shifts.

    The whistleblower said the “only urgency” she saw applied to managing correspondence was when then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab pledged that all MPs would receive an answer to their cases by September 6:

    This was purely in order to enable the Foreign Secretary to say that all emails from MPs had been read, and to issue a generic response.

    Culture

    Stewart said she did not believe that anything was done with any of the information in the emails at that time.

    She said that in the FCDO’s priorities it

    did not seem to be considered important to respond to individuals in distress, even just to acknowledge their situation.

    She added that when she was able to respond to a handful of emails, she was met with

    replies brimming with gratitude, for the simple fact that someone noticed, and responded.

    She said she came to believe that the evacuation was not a humanitarian response but

    was to protect the UK from reputational damage and to manage domestic political fallout.

    Stewart also spoke about the culture in the FCDO, as she said:

    they know there is no space for speaking up, and no prospect of being able to make things any better even if they do.

    She said the death of FCDO diplomat Richard Morris, who took his own life in August 2020 with the coroner concluding that work stress was at least in part a factor, was:

    tragically resonant in terms of the sense of appalling responsibility within a broken system.

    By The Canary

  • Former Top Pentagon Advisor Col. Doug Macgregor On Russia-Ukraine War

    Former senior advisor the Secretary of Defense Col. Doug Macgregor joins Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate for a candid, live discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war and his time in the Trump administration when an Afghan withdrawal was sabotaged and conflict with Iran and Syria continued.

    The post Former Top Pentagon Advisor Col. Doug Macgregor On Russia-Ukraine War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • International Women’s Day 2022

    International Women’s Day is today 8 March and celebratory events are being held around the world. This year’s theme is #BreakTheBias, aimed at imagining “a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination.” While this special day offers hope for gender equity, it is also a reminder of the omnipresent phenomenon of violence against women, which exists regardless of the day, and needs to be addressed in a fundamental way.

    There is too much to choose from (as usual); for last year’s see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/03/08/celebrating-international-womens-day-in-2021/]

    Still, here some concrete samples:

    Upasana Rana reports Global Voices of 7 March on Nepal [https://globalvoices.org/2022/03/07/this-international-womens-day-lets-come-together-against-violence/]

    On the same site Njeri Wangari tells us about how Feminist music icons from around Africa to celebrate this International Women’s Day. See her Spotify playlist with hits from artists like Fatoumata Diawara, Cesária Évora, Shishani Vranckx, Thandiswa Mazwai, and more.

    Amnesty International issued a statement “International Women’s Day: Dramatic deterioration in respect for women’s rights and gender equality must be decisively reversed“

    • Alarming assaults on women’s rights around the world in 2021/22. 
    • Legal protections dismantled, and women human rights defenders now at unprecedented risk.
    • Protection and promotion of women’s and girls’ rights and support for women human rights defenders crucial, including for Covid-19 recovery. 
    • Governments must act decisively to reverse regressions and uphold human rights for women and girls. 

    Catastrophic attacks on human rights and gender equality over the past twelve months have lowered protection for and upped threats against women and girls across the globe.  On International Women’s Day, the organization called for bold action to reverse erosions of human rights for women and girls.   

     “Events in 2021 and in the early months of 2022 have conspired to crush the rights and dignity of millions of women and girls.  The world’s crises do not impact equally, let alone fairly. The disproportionate impacts on women’s and girls’ rights are well-documented yet still neglected, when not ignored outright.  But the facts are clear. The Covid-19 pandemic, the overwhelming rollback on women’s rights in Afghanistan, the widespread sexual violence characterizing the conflict in Ethiopia, attacks on abortion access in the US and Turkey’s withdrawal from the landmark Istanbul Convention on Gender Based Violence: each is a grave erosion of rights in its own terms but taken together? We must stand up to and stare down this global assault on women’s and girls’ dignity,” said Amnesty’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard. [see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/international-womens-day-dramatic-deterioration-in-respect-for-womens-rights-and-gender-equality-must-be-decisively-reversed/]

    Human Rights Watch focuses on Afghanistan: On International Women’s Day, we should remember Afghanistan, and consider what the state of women’s rights there means for the struggle for gender equality worldwide. The Taliban were notorious for violating women’s rights when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. So, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan again on August 15 last year, Afghan women’s rights defenders were deeply skeptical that the new rulers would be any different from the Taliban that controlled the country before, despite their pledges to respect women’s rights. They were right.

    In less than seven months since taking over, the Taliban have:

    • closed most girls’ secondary schools;
    • created barriers to women and girls pursuing higher education;
    • banned women from most paid employment;
    • abolished the Ministry of Women’s Affairs;
    • restricted women’s movement including blocking them from leaving the country alone;
    • dismantled Afghanistan’s system that provided protection from gender-based violence;
    • created barriers to women and girls accessing health care;
    • beaten and abducted women’s rights protesters;
    • silenced female journalists;
    • banned women’s sports; and
    • appointed a men-only administration.

    Afghanistan is not the only country where women’s rights are under attack this International Women’s Day. But the speed and extent of the obliteration of women’s rights in Afghanistan is a warning to women around the world about the fragility of progress toward equality, how quickly it can vanish, and how few will defend it. We should all be in solidarity with Afghan women; their fight is a fight for women’s rights everywhere. [See: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/08/standing-afghan-women-and-girls-international-womens-day]

    Caitlin Fitzsimmons in the Sydney Morning Herald of 6 March argues that “International Women’s Day highlights climate justice as a feminist issue”. Women are on the front lines of the global climate crisis, making up 80 per cent of the 21.5 million people displaced every year by climate-related events. [See: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/international-women-s-day-highlights-climate-justice-as-a-feminist-issue-20220303-p5a1ba.html]

    On International Women’s Day, UN Human Rights stands with women and girls human rights defenders of all ages, backgrounds & identities leading our collective struggle to protect our climate and environment. See.g.:

    Meet Brianna Frueran, a Pacific climate change activist fighting for her native Samoan islands’ survival.

    Meet Mya Pol, a content creator from the United States who advocates for disability rights and educates people about environmentalism on her social media platform.

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

  • Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz

    The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the US while the Gulf War was waged over there.’ ((Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, p. 12.))

    What a strange feeling it was to know that the cruise missile shown descending towards an airport and erupting in a ball of flame was not fired by US or British forces.

    Millions of Westerners raised to admire the ultimate spectacle of high-tech, robotic power, must have quickly suppressed their awe at the shock – this was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.

    Rewind to April 2017: over video footage of Trump’s cruise missiles launching at targets in Syria in response to completely unproven claims that Syria had just used chemical weapons, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams felt a song coming on:

    ‘We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean – I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons” – and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight…’

    TV and newspaper editors feel the same way. Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power.

    In 1991, the ‘white heat’ of our robotic weaponry was ‘beautiful’ because it meant that ‘we’ were so sophisticated, so civilised, so compassionate, that only Saddam’s palaces and government buildings were being ‘surgically’ removed, not human beings. This was keyhole killing. The BBC’s national treasure, David Dimbleby, basked in the glory on live TV:

    ‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman?’1

    Might makes right! This seemed real to Dimbleby, as it did to many people. In fact, it was fake news. Under the 88,500 tons of bombs that followed the launch of the air campaign on January 17, 1991, and the ground attack that followed, 150,000 Iraqi troops and 50,000 civilians were killed. Just 7 per cent of the ordnance consisted of so called ‘smart bombs’.

    By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. A BBC media review explained:

    ‘A number of front pages feature a picture of a Ukrainian woman – a teacher named Helena – with blood on her face and bandages around her head after a block of flats was hit in a Russian airstrike.

    ‘“Her blood on his hands” says the Daily Mirror; the Sun chooses the same headline.’

    ‘Our’ wars are not greeted by such headlines, nor by BBC headlines of this kind:

    ‘In pictures: Destruction and fear as war hits Ukraine’

    The fear and destruction ‘we’ cause are not ‘our’ focus.

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

    ‘Wow! Radical change of policy at BBC News at Ten. It excitedly reports young women – the resistance – making improvised bombs against Russia’s advance. Presumably Palestinians resisting Israel can now expect similar celebratory coverage from BBC reporters’

    A BBC video report was titled:

    ‘Ukraine conflict: The women making Molotov cocktails to defend their city’

    Hard to believe, but the text beneath read:

    ‘The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke to a group of women who were making Molotov cocktails in the park.’

    For the entire morning of March 2, the BBC home page featured a Ukrainian civilian throwing a lit Molotov cocktail. The adjacent headline:

    ‘Russian paratroopers and rockets attack Kharkiv – Ukraine’

    In other words, civilians armed with homemade weapons were facing heavily-armed elite troops. Imagine the response if, in the first days of an invasion, the BBC had headlined a picture of a civilian in Baghdad or Kabul heroically resisting US-UK forces in the same way.

    Another front-page BBC article asked:

    ‘Ukraine invasion: Are Russia’s attacks war crimes?’

    The answer is ‘yes,’ of course – Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, of course, the idea that such an article might have appeared in the first week of that invasion is completely unthinkable.

    Generating The Propaganda Schwerpunkt

    On 27 February, the first 26 stories on the BBC’s home page were devoted to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The BBC website even typically features half a dozen stories on Ukraine at the top of its sports section.

    On 28 February, the Guardian’s website led with the conflict, followed by 20 additional links to articles about the Ukraine crisis. A similar pattern is found in all ‘mainstream’ news media.

    The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war – ‘I stand with Ukraine!’

    Political analyst Ben Norton commented:

    ‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’

    This is no small matter. Norton added:

    ‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’

    Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:

    ‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’

    Over half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids on Yemen are UK-supplied. UK-made equipment includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles, and cluster munitions. Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:

    ‘Researchers on the grounds have discovered weapons fragments that demonstrate the use of UK-made weapons in attacks on civilian targets.’

    Despite the immensity of the catastrophe and Britain’s clear legal and moral responsibility, in 2017, the Independent reported:

    ‘More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.

    ‘A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.

    ‘The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.’

    The Independent added:

    ‘At least 75 people are estimated to be killed or injured every day in the conflict, which has pushed the country to the brink of famine as 14 million people lack a stable access to food.’

    On Twitter, Dr Robert Allan made the point that matters:

    ‘We as tax paying citizens and as a nation are directly responsible for our actions. Not the actions of others. Of course we can and should highlight crimes of nations and act appropriately and benevolently (the UK record here is horrific). 1st – us, NATO, our motives and actions.’

    We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’

    As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat.

    Certainly, we at Media Lens welcome the idea that powerful state-corporate media should be prevented from promoting state violence. It is absurd that individuals are arrested and imprisoned for threatening or inciting violence, while journalists regularly call for massive, even genocidal, violence against whole countries with zero consequences (career advancement aside). But banning media promoting state violence means banning, not just Russian TV, but literally all US-UK broadcasters and newspapers.

    Confirming the hypocrisy, The Intercept reported:

    ‘Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.’

    In 2014, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote:

    ‘The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle.

    ‘But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.’

    The report continued:

    ‘Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.’

    Perhaps the hundreds of journalists who attacked Jeremy Corbyn for questioning the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural – which depicted a mixture of famous historical and identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish bankers – with the single word, ‘Why?’, would care to comment?

    According to our ProQuest search, the Guardian has made no mention of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the last week – as it most certainly would have, if Ukraine were an Official Enemy of the West. ProQuest finds a grand total of three mentions of the Azov Battalion in the entire UK national press – two in passing, with a single substantial piece in the Daily Star – in the last seven days. ‘Impressive discipline’, as Noam Chomsky likes to say.

    ‘Russia Must Be Broken’

    Britain and the US have been waging so much war, so ruthlessly, for so long, that Western journalists and commentators have lost all sense of proportion and restraint. Neil Mackay, former editor of the Sunday Herald (2015-2018), wrote in the Herald:

    ‘Russia must be broken, in the hope that by breaking the regime economically and rendering it a pariah state on the world’s stage, brave and decent Russian people will rise up and drag Putin from power.’

    If nothing else, Mackay’s comment indicated just how little impact was made by the deaths of 500,000 children under five when the US and Britain saw to it that the Iraq economy was ‘broken’ by 13 years of genocidal sanctions.

    For describing his comment as ‘obscene’, Mackay instantly blocked us on Twitter. His brutal demand reminded us of the comment made by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:

    ‘Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation… and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.’

    We can enjoy the ‘shock and awe’ of that comment, if we have no sense at all that Serbian people are real human beings capable of suffering, love, loss and death exactly as profound as our own.

    On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine told a caller, Bill, from Manchester:

    ‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

    Unlike his celebrated interviewer, Bill, clearly no fan of Putin, had retained his humanity:

    ‘Do you?! Do kids deserve to die, 18, 20 – called up, conscripted – who don’t understand it, who don’t grasp the issues?’

    Vine’s sage reply:

    ‘That’s life! That’s the way it goes!’

    We all know what would have happened to Vine if he had said anything remotely comparable of the US-UK forces that illegally invaded Iraq.

    MSNBC commentator Clint Watts observed:

    ‘Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming’

    The strangest thing is media commentators reflexively imagining that US-UK-NATO can lay any moral or legal claim to act as an ultra-violent World Police.

    Professor Michael McFaul of Stanford University, also serving with the media’s 101st Chairborne Division, appeared to be experiencing multiple wargasms when he tweeted:

    ‘More Stingers to Ukraine! More javelins! More drones!’

    Two hours later:

    ‘More NLAWs [anti-tank missiles], Stingers (the best ones), and Javelins for Ukraine! Now!’

    Echoing Mackay, McFaul raved (and later deleted):

    ‘There are no more “innocent” “neutral” Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!’

    Courageous words indeed from his Ivy League office. Disturbing to note that McFaul was ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, widely considered to be a saint.

    ‘Shockingly Arrogant Meddling’ – The Missing History

    So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions.

    In February 2014, after three months of violent, US-aided protests, much of it involving neo-Nazi anti-government militias, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for Russia. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) provide some context:

    ‘On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State [Victoria] Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk — Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats” — should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.’

    The BBC reported Nuland picking the new Ukrainian leader:

    ‘I think “Yats” is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.’

    FAIR continues:

    ‘Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.’

    We can read between the lines when Nuland described how the US had invested ‘over $5 billion’ to ‘ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine’.

    In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:

    ‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’

    Carpenter concluded:

    ‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.

    ‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’

    Within days of the 2014 coup, troops loyal to Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of Ukraine. As Jonathan Steele, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, recently explained:

    ‘NATO’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans.’

    The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:

    ‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’

    Mearsheimer argues that Russia views the expansion of NATO to its border with Ukraine as ‘an existential threat’:

    ‘If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that.’

    Mearsheimer adds:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:

    ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’

    Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The pattern persists today. When Fox News recently spoke about the Russia-Ukraine crisis with former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the key perpetrators of the illegal invasion-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, she nodded her head in solemn agreement when the presenter said:

    ‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.’

    The cognitive dissonance required to engage in this discussion and pass it off as serious analysis is truly remarkable.

    Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:

    ‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’

    It is sobering to read the dissenting arguments above and recall Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s warning to MPs last week:

    ‘Let me be very clear – There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of Nato.’

    The Independent reported that Starmer’s warning came ‘after leading left-wingers – including key shadow cabinet members during the Jeremy Corbyn-era key, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – were threatened with the removal of the whip if their names were not taken off a Stop the War letter that had accused the UK government of “aggressive posturing”, and said that Nato “should call a halt to its eastward expansion”’.

    Starmer had previously waxed Churchillian on Twitter:

    ‘There will be dark days ahead. But Putin will learn the same lesson as Europe’s tyrants of the last century: that the resolve of the world is harder than he imagines and the desire for liberty burns stronger than ever. The light will prevail.’

    Clearly, that liberty does not extend to elected Labour MPs criticising NATO.

    In the Guardian, George Monbiot contributed to the witch-hunt, noting ominously that comments made by John Pilger ‘seemed to echo Putin’s speech the previous night’. By way of further evidence:

    ‘The BBC reports that Pilger’s claims have been widely shared by accounts spreading Russian propaganda.’

    Remarkably, Monbiot offered no counter-arguments to ‘Pilger’s claims’, no facts, relying entirely on smear by association. This was not journalism; it was sinister, hit and run, McCarthy-style propaganda.

    Earlier, Monbiot had tweeted acerbically:

    ‘Never let @johnpilger persuade you that he has a principled objection to occupation and invasion. He appears to be fine with them, as long as the aggressor is Russia, not Israel, the US or the UK.’

    In fact, for years, Pilger reported – often secretly and at great risk – from the Soviet Union and its European satellites. A chapter of his book, ‘Heroes’, is devoted to his secret meetings with and support for Soviet dissidents (See: John Pilger, ‘Heroes’, Pan, 1987, pp.431-440). In his 1977 undercover film on Czechoslovakia, ‘A Faraway Country’, he described the country’s oppressors as ‘fascists’. He commented:

    ‘The people I interview in this film know they are taking great risks just by talking to me, but they insist on speaking out. Such is their courage and their commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia.’

    Three days before Monbiot’s article was published in the Guardian, Pilger had tweeted of Ukraine:

    ‘The invasion of a sovereign state is lawless and wrong. A failure to understand the cynical forces that provoked the invasion of Ukraine insults the victims.’

    Pilger is one of the most respected journalists of our time precisely because he has taken a principled and consistent stand against all forms of imperialism, including Soviet imperialism, Chinese imperialism (particularly its underpinning of Pol Pot), Indonesian imperialism (its invasion of East Timor), and so on.

    Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?

    Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.

    Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.

    To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad.

    As Chomsky has frequently pointed out, it is easy to condemn the crimes of Official Enemies. But it is a basic ethical principle that, first and foremost, we should hold to account those governments for which we share direct political and moral responsibility. This is why we focus so intensively on the crimes of our own government and its leading allies.

    We have condemned Putin’s war of aggression and supported demands for an immediate withdrawal. We are not remotely pro-Russian government – we revile Putin’s tyranny and state violence exactly as much as we revile the West’s tyrannical, imperial violence. We have repeatedly made clear that we oppose all war, killing and hate. Our guiding belief is that these horrors become less likely when journalism drops its double standards and challenges ‘our’ crimes in the same way it challenges ‘theirs’.

    Chomsky explained:

    ‘Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.’

    Our adding a tiny drop of criticism to the tsunami of Western global, billion-dollar-funded, 24/7 loathing of Putin achieves nothing beyond the outcome identified by Chomsky. If we have any hope of positively impacting the world, it lies in countering the illusions and violence of the government for which we are morally accountable.

    But why speak up now, in particular? Shouldn’t we just shut up and ‘get on board’ in a time of crisis? No, because war is a time when propaganda messages are hammered home with great force: ‘We’re the Good Guys standing up for democracy.’ It is a vital time to examine and challenge these claims.

    What critics dismiss as ‘Whataboutism’ is actually ‘Wearenobetterism’. If ‘we’ are no better, or if ‘we’ are actually worse, then where does that leave ‘our’ righteous moral outrage? Can ‘compassion’ rooted in deep hypocrisy be deeply felt?

    Critics dismissing evidence of double standards as ‘whataboutery’, are promoting the view that ‘their’ crimes should be wholly condemned, but not those committed by ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ allies. The actions of Official Enemies are to be judged by a different standard than that by which we judge ourselves.

    As we pointed out via Twitter:

    Spot all the high-profile commentators who condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine…

    …and who remain silent about or support:

    * Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq

    * NATO’s destruction of Libya

    * Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen

    * Apartheid Israel’s crushing of Palestinians

    The question has to be asked: Is the impassioned public response to another media bombardment of the type described by Howard Zinn at the top of this alert a manifestation of the power of human compassion, or is it a manifestation of power?

    Are we witnessing genuine human concern, or the ability of global state-corporate interests to sell essentially the same story over and over again? The same bad guy: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin; the same Good Guys: US, UK, NATO and ‘our’ obedient clients; the same alleged noble cause: freedom, democracy, human rights; the same means: confrontation, violence, a flood of bombs and missiles (‘the best ones’). And the same results: control of whole countries, massively increased arms budgets, and control of natural resources.

    Ultimately, we are being asked to believe that the state-corporate system that has illegally bombed, droned, invaded, occupied and sanctioned so many countries over the last few decades – a system that responds even to the threat of human extinction from climate change with ‘Blah, blah, blah!’ – is motivated by compassion for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. As Erich Fromm wrote:

    ‘To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.’2

    1. Quoted, John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.45.
    2. Fromm, The Art Of Being, Continuum, 1992, p. 19.
    The post Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Racist rhetoric about which refugees deserve help needs to stop now

    There are “two species” of refugee in Europe, philosopher Slavoj Žižek has warned. He was talking about a tweet – now deleted – from the government of his home country, Slovenia. The tweet attempted to draw a line between those fleeing the war in Ukraine from those who were fleeing wars in other parts of the world.

    The tweet claimed:

    The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan are coming.

    Describing this bizarre, racist position, Žižek wrote:

    After an outcry, the tweet was quickly deleted, but the obscene truth was out: Europe must defend itself from non-Europe.

    The evidence suggests this problem extends much wider, and goes much deeper, than just individual governments.

    Blatant racism

    Slovenia’s was just one – very open – example of a wider problem. Ukrainian refugees fleeing the criminal Russian invasion deserve our solidarity. So do Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians. The only fundamental difference between them is their place in a made-up racial hierarchy. And that is deplorable.

    As one Twitter user pointed out on 3 March, it’s possible to have solidarity with more than one group of people at the same time:

    Another was one of many sharing compilations of racist takes in the mainstream media:

    In most cases these involved a level of surprise that war had come to “relatively civilised” country, not a place like Iraq or North Africa. Places we can only assume are ‘uncivilised’.

    Little connection was made in these commentaries as to exactly why somewhere like Iraq, for example, has experienced years of war and violence. Did war magically appear in the Middle East? Or could it be connected to the US-led invasion in 2003? Or the centuries of colonialism beforehand?

    There seems to be no space to look at this vital context in the mainstream commentary on Ukraine.

    Shocking distinction

    Žižek wasn’t the only scholar pointing out this contradiction. Professor of Middle East Studies Ziad Majed said the “magnificent solidarity and humanism” shown toward Ukrainians was vastly different to the “dehumanization of refugees from the Middle East”.

    When you hear certain comments talking about ‘people like us’ it suggests that those who come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa are not.

    “Orientalist and racist”

    The Arab and Middle East Journalist’s Association (AMEJA) also condemned the double standard. It listed many examples, including those in the viral video above:

    AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist [racist against Asian people] and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict.

    AMEJA said these kinds of comment spoke to a deeper problem in Western media:

    This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

    “Two species”

    The outpourings of concern for refugees from Ukraine are justified and welcome. Russia’s illegal invasion, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a war crime akin to the US invasion of Iraq and Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939:

    For those of us who’ve opposed wars and supported refugees for longer than a week, our job is to point out that putting a flag in your profile picture isn’t enough. Because every refugee is worthy of our support, and all wars of aggression should be opposed.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/President of Ukraine, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • US Must Not Use Ukrainians as a Foreign Policy “Tool,” Sanders Adviser Says

    While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily and has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia amounting to what some have called “economic warfare.” We look at Biden’s response with Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, who is also Ukrainian American. He says the U.S. should continue to exhaust all diplomatic avenues in order to stop violence in Ukraine. Duss also details the U.S. role in setting the stage for Putin’s oligarchical government and says the U.S. must not use “Ukrainians as a tool for our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia.”

    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, with Nermeen Shaikh.

    As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, we turn now to look at how the Biden administration is responding to the crisis. Biden has repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion and opposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia in what some have described as a form of “economic warfare.” While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily. CNN is reporting the U.S. has recently delivered hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine for the first time. President Biden took questions outside the White House Wednesday.

    REPORTER 1: Do you support permanent U.S. military presence in Poland and other Eastern European countries now, after what’s happening in Ukraine?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’ve always been there. We’ve always been in all the NATO countries.

    REPORTER 1: I’m talking about permanent bases.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No, that’s a decision for NATO to make.

    REPORTER 2: Do you think that —

    REPORTER 3: Mr. President, what did you mean when you said —

    REPORTER 4: Will you consider getting rid of vaccine mandates?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’m sorry.

    REPORTER 5: Mr. President, are you considering banning Russian oil imports?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Nothing is off the table.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Senator Bernie Sanders. He’s also a Ukrainian American. His father was born in Germany in a displaced persons camp after World War II after his family fled Ukraine.

    Matt Duss, welcome to Democracy Now! Can respond, first of all, just to the overall situation, then particularly to the U.S. response and what needs to be done?

    MATT DUSS: Well, I mean, I think your previous guests described the horrifying situation in Ukraine right now, which is just — we’ve just passed over a week of this Russian invasion. We’re seeing more shelling of Ukrainian cities. And this is from — you know, Putin justified this invasion claiming that he was there to liberate Russians and Ukrainians from a fascist government. We don’t need to tick through all the various justifications he has given, but I think Ukrainians, obviously, knew that was false, but I think Russian soldiers themselves now should be questioning whether that’s false.

    As for the U.S. response, I think we’ve seen, you know, even in the months and certainly the weeks leading up to the invasion, a very energetic diplomatic response from the United States to work with allies in Europe, NATO allies, but not only NATO allies, with allies in Asia, to prepare a sanctions response. I think that sanctions response has been extremely aggressive. It’s become not just sanctions on Putin and his government and oligarchs around Putin, but over the week we saw serious sanctions cutting off a number of banks from the SWIFT system, as your previous guest mentioned, but also effectively blocking sanctions on the central bank of Russia. So, these are very, very serious measures, and I think we’ll have to watch now how Putin decides to respond.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Matt, as you know, many have called for more — many in Ukraine have called for, minimally, more punitive sanctions, including an embargo on oil and gas exports. Europe is, of course, dependent for most of its gas and oil — 40 and 30%, respectively — from Russia. And Russia’s revenues, of course, also come from the sale of these oil and gas reserves. Could you talk about whether you think that’s likely, and, even if these sanctions are imposed, whether that is likely to deter Russia?

    MATT DUSS: Right. No, I think there are two things here. One, that is it likely? And I want to say it’s very possible, although that is something that is going to hit European countries much, much harder, and, frankly, it’s going to hit the United States much harder. And, you know, it’s going to raise the price of gas. It’s going to raise the price of goods. That’s certainly not an argument against it. I mean, I think if we are serious about imposing costs on the Russian government and on Vladimir Putin, that is, as President Biden said in the press remarks that you just played, everything is on the table. I think it also gets at the importance, ultimately — and this is something my boss, Senator Sanders, has talked about — to use this moment to shift more aggressively to green energy and deny these authoritarian regimes, not just Putin but a broader set of petrostates, the revenues they require to rule.

    But getting to the second point: How does this impact Putin’s calculation, the Russian government’s calculation? That is a real — you know, that’s a question I have, as well. I think Putin has, unfortunately, laid out a number of very, very expansive goals and has not really left himself — I mean, it’s hard to see how he would climb down from the very expansive agenda he’s laid out. Many of your listeners are probably aware of the speech that he gave last week on the eve of the invasion, where he kind of laid out his theory that Ukraine is not a real country and this is part of the kind of Russian imperium, as he defines it. You know, and he would not be the first leader to walk back from some very wild — you know, this kind of wild agenda. But as of right now, it’s unclear to me how he might do that.

    And we should also be very mindful of the impact that these sanctions are going to make, not just on the regime but on Russian working people themselves. This is, I think, a broader concern that progressives have about these kinds of sanctions tools, because if the theory of the case is that you will put pressure on the people who will, in turn, put pressure on their rulers, it’s not quite clear how exactly that works when you’re dealing with governments that are simply not responsive to the will of their people, as is the case in Russia.

    AMY GOODMAN: Matt, I wanted to ask you about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments on MSNBC Monday, talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    HILLARY CLINTON: Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. And although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisers to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn’t end well for the Russians. There were other unintended consequences, as we know. But the fact is that a very motivated and then funded and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. … I think that is the model that people are now looking toward.

    AMY GOODMAN: “Unintended consequences,” Matt Duss?

    MATT DUSS: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: Again, that’s the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

    MATT DUSS: Yeah, I would just respond to that by saying it didn’t end well for the Russians; it really didn’t end well for anyone, least of all the people of Afghanistan themselves. So, I certainly understand this may — you know, this invasion may backfire, ultimately, on Putin and on the Russian government, but I think we should not see this in terms simply of using the Ukrainians as a tool of our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia. I think the goal needs to be to end this fighting as quickly as we possibly can, to use every diplomatic lever we can to end this fighting. I think that should be our focus.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to quickly ask you about oligarchs. You referred to the Russian oligarchs. But you talk about the oligarchs on both sides.

    MATT DUSS: Mm-hmm, yeah, that’s right. I mean, what is an oligarch? It’s a very wealthy and politically influential person, just in its broadest definition. Certainly, there is a set of oligarchs that have a lot of influence in Russia. And let’s understand, one of the reasons why these oligarchs do have such power and wealth and influence is in large part because of the kind of neoliberal shock therapy that was applied to Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, backed often by U.S. economists, who effectively auctioned off — who urged Russia to auction off the people’s property, and it was gathered up by these oligarchs for their own wealth. And Putin — you know, this led to such an economic collapse and economic hardship that this, in turn, enabled the rise of a strongman like Putin, who gathered the oligarchs under his own control.

    And this is certainly not the first time the United States has run this scam. Let’s understand, this kind of shock therapy has been applied in a number of countries around the world and has produced similar authoritarian outcomes. Now, having said that, I think we also have — you know, in our political system, while it is certainly not the same as Russia’s, to say the least, we have a problem here of large concentrations of wealth and the political influence that that can buy in our system.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Matt, I’d like to conclude by asking you about what you imagine the trajectory of this conflict might be. I mean, what Hillary Clinton said about unintended consequences and, of course, also about the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan by — the Soviets at the time in Afghanistan is wrong. There are people who are expecting that this may turn out the same way, because even though the Americans and the Europeans have ruled out a no-fly zone, they are flooding Ukraine with weapons. And Russia, Putin doesn’t show any indication of backing down, because, as you pointed out, it’s not clear how he would save face or, indeed, how at this point the Russians can extract themselves. What do you think a resolution would look like? And do you think it’s likely?

    MATT DUSS: Yeah, well, hopefully — I mean, the goal here, whether one agrees with it or not, I would say that the Biden administration’s approach here has been fairly consistent for some time, which is to make clear to Putin that this invasion will be much more costly than he might have imagined. And I certainly think that Putin is seeing that right now, both in terms of the strength and the breadth of the sanctions that have been applied on Russia, with the U.S. working with its allies around the world, but also in terms of the Ukrainian resistance. I think some of the casualties that you read out earlier, these are pretty remarkable. I think there are some estimates that put the number of Russian troops killed at around 7,000. We should be cautious about those numbers right now. But let’s just understand, 7,000 would be as many troops as the U.S. lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost combined, in nearly 20 years.

    So, in terms — so, the logic here is, you know, understanding that the Ukrainians themselves are resisting the Russian invasion. I think they have a right to do so, certainly. I think the goal should continue to be, or our focus should continue to be: What are the steps that end this fighting quickest, that continue to support diplomacy? Yes, the Ukrainians are agreeing to meet once again with the Russians, as you noted, on the Belarus border to find some diplomatic resolution here that ends the fighting. But, to be very honest, as I said earlier, given the aims that Putin has laid out, it’s unclear to me if he is ready to take that offramp. So, for the time being, unfortunately — and it’s enormously painful to say this — but it’s hard for me to see how this stops anytime soon.

    AMY GOODMAN: Matt Duss, we want to thank you so much for being with us, foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Matt Duss is a Ukrainian American.

    Coming up, could Russia’s war in Ukraine spark a nuclear catastrophe? Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned if a Third World War is to take place, it’ll be nuclear. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: “Gonna Be an Engineer” by Peggy Seeger. It is Women’s History Month.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Children on the edge of life in Afghanistan

    Save the Children is releasing a powerful series of photographs by world-renowned photographer Jim Huylebroek to highlight the human tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan as the country this week marks six months since the dramatic transition of power

    The photographer Jim Huylebroek travelled across the country with the international children’s agency Save the Children, from the drought-ravaged plains of the north to the freezing streets of Kabul, capturing the stories of children whose lives have been devastated by the humanitarian crisis, for the series titled: children on the edge of life.

    Children on the outskirts of Kabul

    Continue reading…

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

  • Paralysing Afghanistan: Washington’s Regime Change Agenda

    Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests.  Conditions of mad instability are fostered.  Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change.

    Nothing is more counter-intuitive than the effort to isolate, cripple and strangulate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.  For all the talk about terrorism and concerns about failing regimes, the Biden Administration is doing every bit to make this regime fail and encourage the outcome it decries. Along the way, a humanitarian catastrophe is in the making.

    Prior to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, foreign aid constituted a mainstay of the economy, covering roughly three-quarters of public spending.  After August 15, an almost immediate cessation of funding took place, led by the United States, and those less than noble institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  But it did not stop there.  Billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s own funds were frozen.  (For the US alone, this amounted to $9.4 billion.)

    This particularly nasty bit of statecraft was justified by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as necessary to coerce the Taliban into good conduct.  Releasing such reserves was “no guarantee that the Taliban will actually use it effectively to solve problems.”

    Johnson should know, given his government’s profligate tendency of waste and dissoluteness during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Ever one to relish hypocrisy, he claimed that Britain and its allies needed “to ensure that that country does not slip back into being a haven for terrorism and a narco-state.”  Ironically, the sanctions and asset freezing regime will be an incitement to just that.

    The move did not only paralyse the Central Bank of Afghanistan but impose dramatic limits on the use of bank accounts by Afghans.  Loans have been left unrepaid, the amount in deposits has declined, and the liquidity crisis has become acute.  In November 2021, the UN Development Programme observed that the economic cost of a banking collapse in the country “would be colossal.”

    The UNDP also remarked that the banking situation had to be “resolved quickly to improve Afghanistan’s limited production capacity and prevent the banking system from collapsing.”  Unfortunately, the organisation’s Afghanistan head, Abdallah al Dardari, was wishing to do the impossible.  “We need to find a way to make sure that if we support the banking sector, we are not supporting the Taliban.”

    This foggy-headed reasoning typifies much policy towards Afghanistan, dooming humanitarian programs and other measures of assistance.  It also renders Washington, and its allies, culpable in fostering famine, starvation, and death.  As long as they can focus their attention on the wickedness, and lack of competence, of the Taliban regime, this monumental bit of callous gangsterism can be justified.  The Afghan civilian can thereby be divorced from the government official disliked and disapproved of by foreign powers.

    With pestilential force, this contorted line of thinking finds its way into the heart of the US State Department, which has expressed its desire to cooperate with the UNDP and other institutions “to find ways to offer liquidity, to infuse, to see to it that the people of Afghanistan can take advantage of international support in ways that don’t flow into the coffers of the Taliban”.

    In January, the crisis was becoming so grave as to compel the UN Secretary General António Guterres to describe a landscape of catastrophe: the selling of babies to feed siblings, freezing health facilities overrun by crowds of malnourished children and people “burning their possessions to keep warm.”  Without a full-fledged effort by the international community, the Secretary warned, “virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty.”

    A modest request was made: that Afghanistan receive $5 billion in aid.  The UN chief has also urged the release of international funding to pay the salaries of public sector workers and aid the distribution of health care, education “and other vital services.”

    The international community, or at least a portion of it, is certainly not listening.  Sanctions continue to be the mainstay of the treatment of Afghanistan, as orchestrated through the UN Security Council.  Perversely, this is done, in the words of the Australian Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs to “promote the peace, stability and security of Afghanistan.”  This is darkly witty stuff indeed, given that sanctions are, by their very purpose, designed to destabilise and target governments, while impoverishing the populace and creating desperation.

    What President Biden has done this month is tinker with the freezing order by decreeing the release of $7 billion.  But there is a huge catch: half of the funds will be reserved to satisfy legal claims brought by the families of US 9/11 victims; the rest will be placed in a designated humanitarian fund for Afghanistan.  In doing so, a foreign government has effectively determined how to deal with a country’s national assets and foreign reserves, effectively initiating a de facto theft.

    Many a famine and societal collapse has been a product of engineered circumstances.  “This impending mass murder of Afghan civilians,” argue the undersigned luminaries of a note published in CounterPunch, “is preventable.”  For those on a list including Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and Tariq Ali, the Biden Administration should “immediately end these cruel and inhumane policies by lifting the sanctions, unfreezing Afghanistan’s foreign assets, and increasing humanitarian aid.”

    For those wedded to the canard and moral excitement of the “rules-based” order, causing a degree of horrendous harm comes as second nature.  Having lost Afghanistan, as every great power has tended to do, revenge is being sought.

    The post Paralysing Afghanistan: Washington’s Regime Change Agenda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghan human rights defender Mariam Atahi continues from far away

    Mariam Atahi left Afghanistan for safe haven abroad in August 2021 with financial assistance from Journalists for Human Rights and the Daniel Pearl Foundation. However, her fight for women’s rights continues, uninterrupted.

    As the Taliban began its ‘humanitarian talks’ last month in Oslo, Mariam called for the release of three fellow activists, allegedly detained for protesting against the closure of women’s universities. “It hurts me,” she said, “…to not have any information or hope to give their families asking questions about their whereabouts.”

    As co-founder of the Feminine Perspectives Campaign, Mariam has been leading a fearless movement to demand accountability for the violation of women’s rights by the Taliban. In 2016, she and four colleagues interviewed women from different provinces to document “what women exactly want” and presented them during the 2016 talks with the Taliban in Qatar. They stressed that the freedom to study, work and participate in public life is important to women in urban Kabul and rural provinces alike.

    This work put a target on her back. In late 2019, Mariam was working as a communications specialist at Save The Children and was informed by the National Directorate of Security in Afghanistan that she’s on the Taliban’s hit list. At the time, she was used to fielding multiple ‘mysterious calls’ a week. However, the NDS insisted she take the risk more seriously. Mariam applied for an emergency visa to India and relocated to Delhi for two months. When she returned in early 2020, the threats continued. She changed her look, her route to work and her schedule – but kept on working. In 2021, she took on a communications role with UNICEF.

    “Fighting for women and children’s rights is in my blood. When I see women suffering, I feel responsible. I want to build a bridge for them to reach their dreams. I have to do this work for the rest of my life.”

    After the Taliban takeover, Mariam decided to leave Afghanistan for a safer location where she can continue her work.

    ‘In Kabul, I always felt like someone is knocking at my door. I want to set myself in a better position, so I’m able to mobilize more resources to help my people. I hope to see the international community show their solidarity with Afghan women and make a solid, genuine commitment to safeguarding their rights.”

    “Fighting for women’s rights is in my blood”: Mariam Atahi, activist

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

  • The US Owes Afghanistan Reparations, Not Starvation

    A man carries his daughter as people queue to enter the passport office at a checkpoint in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 19, 2021.

    During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

    But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

    When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

    They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

    Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

    After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

    These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

    ***

    Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

    “Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”

    Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”

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

    For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

    After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

    The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

    “After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”

    Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

    Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Greta stands with Sami and Navalny on trial again: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico

    Continue reading…

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

  • US Is Effectively Stealing Billions From a Nation Ravaged by a US-Initiated War

    People hold placards as they march during a protest against the recent remarks by President Joe Biden to freeze Afghanistan's assets, in Kabul on February 15, 2022.

    President Joe Biden recently declared a national emergency in the name of addressing the dual threats of the massive humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan, as well as “the potential for a deepening economic collapse in Afghanistan.” He was right to do so.

    In sharp contrast, his decision to unilaterally assert the U.S.’s authority to redistribute $7.1 billion of Afghanistan’s frozen funds as it sees fit was dead wrong. In declaring the national emergency, the president laid out his administration’s vision for Afghanistan’s funds should U.S. courts voice their approval: that half be made available, pending litigation, to the families of 9/11 victims who have claims against the Taliban for its role in harboring al-Qaeda. The remaining $3.5 billion would go towards humanitarian efforts.

    Setting aside the moral and political problems inherent in the U.S. effectively stealing billions of dollars from a nation ravaged by a U.S.-initiated war and the resulting humanitarian and economic devastation, the president’s failure to make any of these funds immediately available to the people of Afghanistan in their hour of need is unforgivable. In abdicating responsibility to the courts, which may take months to decide how these frozen funds can be redistributed, the Biden administration is threatening the well-being of millions of Afghans, while also undermining the ability of civil society organizations to respond to the crisis. This is in direct opposition to the “beacon of human rights” the U.S. claims to be.

    To say that Afghanistan is in urgent need is to understate the severity of the situation. Over 24 million Afghans, nearly 60 percent of the population, need humanitarian aid. Some 23 million face acute food insecurity, meaning their lives are in immediate danger, and over 1 million children are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition. While Afghanistan has faced humanitarian challenges for years as a result of conflict, U.S. occupation and natural disasters, the current situation is markedly worse, in no small part due to U.S. policies towards Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

    When the Taliban took control of the country last August, the Biden administration froze $7.1 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign reserves held in the U.S. — money that belongs to the Afghan people — and that prior to the takeover, the Central Bank of Afghanistan (Da Afghanistan Bank) had been using to maintain economic stability.

    The resulting liquidity crisis has led to massive inflation, alongside depreciation of the Afghani, whose value the Central Bank can no longer stabilize by selling off its foreign reserves. Many banks in Afghanistan have dramatically limited the amount of money account holders can withdraw, while others have closed entirely. Businesses, no longer able to pay their employees, have shuttered, leading to rampant unemployment. The price of food has risen, while the value of the Afghani has plummeted, leading to mass starvation.

    As a further result of freezing these funds and of U.S. sanctions that have led risk-averse banks to severely limit access to financial services in Afghanistan, local and international aid groups and other civil society organizations in Afghanistan are struggling to pay their staff and provide services to the millions of Afghans in need.

    Kate Phillips-Barrasso, director of humanitarian policy at InterAction, a network of humanitarian aid organizations, recently explained that financial service providers “just don’t want to get involved. There’s a lot of risk aversion. Financial institutions say that even with explicit permission, it still reeks of effort and risk, and it’s better to just not provide the service.” As a result, aid organizations are turning to informal cash transfer networks, which entail greater risk and higher fees. Some have also turned to cryptocurrency as another means of getting funds into the country, despite challenges arising from limited use of cryptocurrency among much of the population. While these workarounds have offered some relief, limited access to cash and financial services is still plaguing the humanitarian aid sector as a direct result of U.S. policy.

    The Biden administration must urgently reconsider and correct its policies towards Afghanistan, and towards Afghanistan’s foreign reserves in particular. Shah Mehrabi, a member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s Central Bank and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, has called on the administration to “allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan limited, monitored, and conditional access to $150m per month from Afghanistan’s foreign reserves,” citing the Central Bank’s “independen[ce] from the Afghan government,” and the U.S.’s ability to monitor how the funds are dispersed. Some form of a phased release of the frozen funds has widespread support, including from members of the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and prominent international aid groups, human rights groups, and women’s human rights and peace groups.

    Beyond releasing the frozen funds, the Biden administration must also lift sanctions on Afghanistan, which have done almost nothing to incentivize the Taliban to change its policies. Instead, sanctions have unleashed a chilling effect on national and international banking in Afghanistan by shutting down access to financial services, causing dire repercussions to Afghan lives and preventing civil society groups from addressing the crisis. While the U.S. Treasury Department has issued piecemeal general licenses aimed at enabling civil society organizations to continue their work in Afghanistan, these necessary but insufficient steps have failed to address the financial access issues caused by sanctions, let alone the liquidity crisis caused by freezing Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.

    There is room for honest debate about precisely how, not if, these frozen funds should be returned to the people of Afghanistan, and which, if any, sanctions should remain in place — however, there is no room, or time, to cling to a status quo that is starving Afghanistan’s people and its economy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Afghanistan Counsel Left the White House in January. Now He’s Poised to Reap Financial Windfall From Billions in Seized Afghan Assets.

    A lead attorney for the families of 9/11 victims who sued the Taliban — plaintiffs who could receive billions of dollars as a result of the Biden administration’s decision to seize the reserves of the Afghanistan central bank — also worked until January at the Biden White House on Afghanistan issues. Lee Wolosky, co-chair of the litigation department at the law firm Jenner & Block LLP, was appointed to aid with Afghan evacuees in September 2021 and returned to his firm last month.

    After the fall of Kabul, the U.S. government seized the assets of the country’s central bank, and last week the administration announced it would hold half of the roughly $7 billion for families who had brought suit against the Taliban, and deploy the other half at some undetermined point in time “for the benefit of the Afghan people.”

    On Monday, Wolosky himself signed a brief asking the judges in the families’ case against the Taliban to move forward with enforcing the settlement. The long-running lawsuit stands to be a lucrative payday for the high-powered attorneys working on the once long-shot case. Lawyers often take a percentage of damages awarded, which in this case easily puts the payout into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Neither Jenner & Block nor Wiggins Childs Quinn & Pantazis LLC, two of the lead law firms representing the victims seeking compensation from the Afghanistan government, responded to a request for comment on the role of Wolosky or the firms’ fee structure for the decision. A representative of Wolosky referred questions to the White House.

    In September, when Wolosky joined the administration, Axios reported he would be involved in resettlement of refugees “as well as other issues related to the U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan.” Wolosky was reportedly hired as a “special government employee,” a role that allows temporary appointments for up to 130 days in a year. Wolosky officially signed onto the 9/11 victims’ case on January 13, 2021, according to his filing with the court.

    The White House said that Wolosky recused himself from discussions over whether the Afghan central bank reserves should be seized and handed over to him and his clients. “Lee Wolosky’s service as an SGE at the White House Counsel’s Office ended on January 6, 2022. Lee was formally recused from all matters related to Jenner & Block during his time as an SGE,” a White House spokesperson said. “Given his past representation of the victims of 9/11, he was specifically recused and walled off from any and all discussions related to any litigation related to the victims of 9/11, including but not limited to the disposition of the Afghan reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

    Prior to his role at Jenner & Block, Wolosky was a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, where he also represented the families of 9/11 victims in an effort to seize funds from the Iranian central bank held in Luxembourg, arguing that Iran had aided Al Qaeda. Luxembourg ultimately ruled that the sovereign immunity of Iran took precedence over the plaintiff’s claim. Before that, Wolosky was appointed by former President Barack Obama to lead the ultimately failed effort to close the Guantánamo Bay prison.

    The Afghanistan central bank was designed largely by the United States during the occupation and was modeled on the Federal Reserve. It remains in operation today, and two members of its board are Afghan American. By law, it is independent of the government and can’t be raided for pet government projects or to patch deficits. Its mandate is limited to price and currency stability. President Joe Biden’s use of the reserves to pay off a legal judgment for the clients of a recent senior administration official puts the administration’s criticism of the previous Afghan government as hopelessly corrupt in a new light.

    The consequences of seizing the reserves of the central bank have been similar in Afghanistan to what would happen to the U.S. economy if the Federal Reserve was suddenly shut down. Businesses have been unable to secure loans, depositors have been unable to access money held in banks, importers have been unable to fund imports, the currency has collapsed, and prices have soared. More than a million refugees have fled starvation since the fall.

    “The administration’s executive order on the frozen funds is tantamount to brazen theft and a death sentence for countless Afghans,” said Arash Azizzada, co-founder of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow. “It’s shortsight, cruel and will serve to worsen the catastrophe currently unfolding in Afghanistan.”

    “Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people,” he added, “will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan.”

    The post Biden’s Afghanistan Counsel Left the White House in January. Now He’s Poised to Reap Financial Windfall From Billions in Seized Afghan Assets. appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Valentines Day Vigil To Promote Aid To Afghanistan

    With the UN reporting that hunger in Afghanistan could kill more civilians than the 20-year Afghanistan war, an international debate is raging over the policy by the U.S. and other governments about getting aid to that country. The president just announced a plan to confiscate $7 Billion in Afghan funds and set aside half of it for families of 9/11 victims and to create a “third-party trust fund” to pay for humanitarian aid with the other half. Critics of the decision, including those who worked for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, lambasted Biden’s decision saying that the currency reserves belong to the Afghan people.

    With those debates as a background, peace groups and humanitarian groups are coming together in a Valentine’s Day Vigil to memorialize the loss of life and to ask that the U.S. change its policies. 

    The post Valentines Day Vigil To Promote Aid To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Operation Cyclone – Ukraine Edition’ The Real plan?

    For almost three months, the Western mainstream media, in a move not dissimilar to its previous assertions that Saddam Hussein had the capability to launch WMDs within 45 minutes, or that Iran was building a nuclear bomb, has repeatedly claimed that Russia is planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of its Western neighbour Ukraine – under the rule of the successive US-EU friendly governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since the 2014 Euromaidan, a CIA and MI6-orchestrated regime change operation launched in response to then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with the Russian Federation.

    The post ‘Operation Cyclone – Ukraine Edition’ The Real plan? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden’s Multi-Billion Afghan Theft Gets Scant Mention on TV News

     

    AP: Ex-Afghan president: Biden order on frozen funds an atrocity

    ABC‘s website had an AP report (2/13/22) on Biden’s misappropriation of Afghan funds—but nothing on its TV news programs.

    Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.

    While influenced by drought and Taliban policies, the current crisis is primarily driven by the US decisions to freeze the assets of the country’s central bank and maintain economic sanctions, which have destabilized the banking system and sent the economy into a tailspin.

    Last Friday, Biden announced his intention to take the $7 billion in frozen funds currently held in US banks and use them as he sees fit, giving half to a humanitarian aid trust fund for Afghans and half to families of 9/11 victims.

    Lest anyone imagine this to be generous in any way, note that the $7 billion—most of which originated as international aid, and representing the vast majority of the central bank’s assets—belongs to the Afghan people, not to Biden. And the Afghan people bear zero responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, they are also its victims, because of the subsequent US decision to invade and occupy their country.

    Beyond that, giving them back half of the money that is rightfully theirs in the form of “aid”—instead of returning it to the banking system—is not only a band-aid that doesn’t solve the country’s liquidity problem, it’s nearly impossible to do anyway, given the sanctions still in place (Relief Web, 2/12/21).

    Biden’s announcement offered a perfect hook for reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and anyone who truly cares about the Afghan people and their rights should be tearing their hair out and screaming at the top of their lungs about this audacious injustice that will surely result in more deaths and hardship. But despite their wailing about the Taliban’s impact on Afghan women’s futures, few in US TV news seem concerned about those same women facing starvation as a result of US policy.

    Since Biden’s announcement on February 11, there have been a total of 10 mentions on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC: six the day of the announcement, four the next day, and none by the third day. The broadcast network news shows, which have more viewers than cable news, aired exactly zero reports on the issue. CNN made eight mentions, MSNBC two and Fox one. Six of the ten were brief mentions that noted no criticism of the move.

    MSNBC: Biden Proposes Splitting Afghanistan Funds

    Masuda Sultan to Chris Hayes (MSNBC, 2/11/22): “This was a devastating day for Afghans who were hoping to have a sign that their economy would have a chance of surviving.”

    Only two shows deemed the story big enough to bring on a guest to discuss it: Jake Tapper‘s CNN show (2/11/22) and Chris Hayes‘ MSNBC show (2/11/22). Hayes devoted the last several minutes of his show to an interview with guest Masuda Sultan of the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Hayes noted that the US “could help [the Afghan] people by simply doing one thing, unfreezing of the billions of dollars of Afghan government assets that are sitting in New York banks,” and Sultan argued that Biden’s move would simply create “a bigger and bigger humanitarian disaster, by not allowing banking to function and not allowing the economy to be back on its feet”:

    What Afghans need more than anything, is food, indeed, they need aid, but they also need jobs, they need an economy, they need to be able to import food, they need to be able to pay their teachers, pay their healthcare workers. You know, all of these sort of normal functions that you expect to happen in a country are now crippled.

    Tapper, in contrast, invited a family member of a 9/11 victim for her perspective on the decision. (Tapper did ask his guest to respond to “the people who say this is just penalizing this move today, the Afghan people who are suffering greatly, and they shouldn’t be hurt because of what happened on 9/11.”)

    Intercept: Biden’s Decision on Frozen Afghanistan Money Is Tantamount to Mass Murder

    Austin Ahlman (Intercept, 2/11/22): “The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended.”

    CNN‘s Newsroom (2/11/22) and New Day Saturday (2/12/22) were the only other two shows to even briefly mention any criticisms or questions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the decision.

    On Newsroom, reporter Jeremy Diamond noted that “there are questions, though, about whether taking these funds away from the central bank could make it more difficult for Afghanistan to stabilize its currency.”

    A serious report would have explained that these aren’t merely questions, they’re certainties, and Biden knows it. As a senior Democratic foreign policy aide told the Intercept‘s Austin Ahlman (2/11/22), Biden

    has had warnings from the UN secretary general, the International Rescue Committee and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.

    On CNN, Diamond’s colleague Jim Sciutto concluded: “Trying to strike some sort of middle line here between not helping the Taliban, but somehow getting help urgently to the Afghan people.”

    It’s the best possible framing a murderous multi-billion-dollar theft could get.

     

    The post Biden’s Multi-Billion Afghan Theft Gets Scant Mention on TV News appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Biden’s $7 billion Afghan heist

    With his Executive Order redefining Afghanistan’s Fiscal Reserve as a slush fund to be disbursed on his whim and with the stroke of his pen, President Biden has taken what may well be the final step in an experiment gone amok. The U.S. first attempted to make Afghanistan into a Western democracy, instead installed a kleptocracy, made Afghans endure 20 years of violence and then left in a whirlwind of chaos. With Biden’s latest move to deprive Afghanistan of its monetary reserves, the nation is likely to come full circle, turning once again into a failed state that, in the absence of economic recovery, will become a breeding ground for extremism and the recruitment of terrorists.

    Of the country’s reserves, $7 billion were “parked” in U.S. financial institutions. This is normal procedure for developing countries, with the, now in retrospect, very ironic purpose of keeping funds in a secure place. Watching this latest Biden debacle, Central Banks of multiple countries are now surely contemplating pulling their monies out of U.S. financial institutions to protect them against arbitrary dictatorial disposal.

    After the Executive Order was issued, Da Afghanistan Bank — Afghanistan’s U.S.-built Central Bank — issued a statement that was both judicious and, to an American reader, embarrassing. It offered a measured, dumbed down 101 on what a monetary reserve is and what a Central Bank does. One might have hoped that a U.S. president, or at least his advisers, would know this, but evidently not.

    From their tutorial:

    As per the law and relevant regulations, Federal Exchange Reserves…are used to implement monetary policy, facilitate international trade and stabilize the financial sector. The real owners of these reserves are the people of Afghanistan. These reserves were not and are not the property of governments, parties or groups and are never used as per their demand and decisions…The Foreign Exchange Reserves are managed based on international practices.

    President Biden, however, announced that he was assigning half of the money, $3.5 billion, to settle ongoing claims by 9/11 families against the Taliban for hosting Al Qaeda. The other half will go to international NGOs that provide aid to Afghanistan, a move that was pitched as an act of amazing generosity. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that it shows America will always stand by Afghanistan.

    But a closer look shows America is not standing by Afghanistan, but instead draining Afghan’s coffers. The current situation in Afghanistan is as follows. When the Taliban took power in August 2021, after the calamitous U.S. withdrawal and the instant caving of President Ghani and the Afghan National Army, Biden ordered the freezing of Afghan assets and accounts. Instead of experiencing a “peace dividend” now that active warfare had ceased, and being able to start slowly rebuilding houses, homes, businesses and lives, the Afghan economy went into free-fall.

    With no cash in the Central Bank, savings could not be withdrawn and salaries could not be paid. Most trade ground to a halt. International agencies and NGOs were unable to help very much, because they, too, could not transfer money into the country and could not withdraw their deposits since there was not enough currency in circulation. The UN and humanitarian groups began to issue dire warnings about the severity of this year’s winter, the depleted food supplies as a result of an unusually long drought, and the inability to import food and fuel due to sanctions and frozen assets. While pledges were made by donors, almost always, the pledges fell well short of the enormous needs and only a fraction of pledges end up being fulfilled. Besides, delivery of aid by international institutions with their enormous overhead is a wasteful, expensive and inefficient method that does nothing to make recipients self-sufficient or give them hope for their future.

    Once the United States decided to withdraw and leave Afghans to their fate, the right thing to do was to at least give them back their property and with it, a fighting chance. To allay concerns about possible Taliban misuse of the funds, banking professionals have proposed releasing the money in monthly tranches. Monitors would check exactly where that money goes and what is done with it. The moment anything seems improper, a freeze could instantly be reinstituted.

    If their Central Bank could stabilize the currency and the exchange rate, inject liquidity into the system and get the banking system as a whole back on an even keel, organic economic recovery could commence.

    But as it stands now, this man-made economic collapse is crushing a vulnerable population at the most vulnerable moment in its recent history. More than 40 percent of Afghans are below the age of 14. If there is no work to be had, their older brothers will be open to recruitment by ISIS, or will make their way across the borders into neighboring countries and from there, join the refugee stream towards Western Europe.

    It may satisfy the vindictive impulses of some to see the Taliban preside over a population sinking into misery and disorder, but let’s examine what we are actually doing here. We are punishing 40 million people because we don’t like the Taliban. We are holding responsible for 9/11 a population whose majority was not even born in 2001 and who certainly bear no blame. In the name of benefiting 9/11 families, we are seeding the ground for the next 9/11 and disgracing our own principles of justice.

    After World War II, the United States was remarkably generous towards a population that arguably could have been held more to blame for elevating, electing, and cheering for a genocidal dictator. A Marshall Plan allowed for Germany and Austria to rebuild their industries and economies, repair their devastated cities and bring their families back to good health. The Biden Plan, by contrast, aims to turn Afghanistan into a failed state and to turn its population into a nation of beggars.

    After the humiliating U.S. exit from Afghanistan, Biden’s decision to freeze and then redistribute the nation’s reserves was a political move designed to show his Republican opponents how tough he can be on the Taliban. But a political move that will lead to more starvation and chaos cannot be allowed to stand. Already, legal teams are looking at how to block the $3.5 billion from being awarded to 9/11 families.

    The NGO Unfreeze Afghanistan has issued a call urging all NGOs not to accept any of the other $3.5 billion allocated for “humanitarian aid.” And people in both Afghanistan and the United States are organizing protests and petitions to rescind this order. Even 9/11 family members are weighing in. Barry Admunson, who lost his brother in the 9/11 attack and is part of the group called 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, is advocating against Biden’s decision. “We can’t bring our loved ones back,” he told us, “but we can save the lives of people in Afghanistan by advocating that the Biden Administration release this money to its rightful owners: the Afghan people.”

    • Reprinted from Responsible Statescraft

    The post Biden’s $7 billion Afghan heist first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Terrible Fate Facing The Afghan People

    Despite repeated warnings from UN bodies about the impending humanitarian disaster underway in Afghanistan, the US government and others have decided to deny the government life-saving funds.

    The post The Terrible Fate Facing The Afghan People appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden’s Bottomless Cruelty to Afghans

    On February 11th, the New York Times bannered “Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds,” and reported that “President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York,” though Afghanistan is facing “a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees — and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief” (greatly burdening the U.N. and other relief-agencies). This Afghan starvation is largely due to Biden’s having frozen the Afghan Government’s funds as retaliation for Afghans’ having so unceremoniously driven out the U.S. occupying forces and enormously embarrassed him by so publicly displaying their revulsion at what America had done to them, and at the supreme corruption of the Government that America had installed to rule them.

    America’s Government is now stealing $3.5 billion from starving Afghans — who had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — in order to pay this money to “a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks” who felt that this money from the savings and checking accounts of Afghan citizens should go to them instead.

    This is how Biden panders for votes in order to keep a Democratic Party majority in Congress, instead of a Republican Party majority (which, of course, would be no less cruel).

    The NYT report said that Biden has concluded that it “is in the national interest” for this money to go to these American families, instead of to starving Afghans, though “It is highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil.” If this is the price that ‘ungrateful’ starving Afghans will have to pay in order for Biden to be able to retain his Party’s dominance in Congress, then they’ll just have to pay it, even if many thousands of Afghans might starve to death as a result.

    On January 17 Oxfam headlined “Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall,” but hid the identities of those 10; however, Investopedia bannered just two days later, “The 10 Richest People in the World” and reported that these 10 men were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison — 9 out of ten were Americans (only Arnault was not). So: those were the people who have doubled their wealth during the Covid-19 plague, while the bottom 99% (including maybe all Afghans) have experienced “falling incomes,” and while Afghan families can’t even get their own money out of their banks, because Biden needs his revenge against Afghans, and needs a Democratic Party majority in Congress.

    By no means do all 9/11 families feel that this money from poor Afghans should go to these Americans instead. The NYT said:

    Not all relatives of the Sept. 11 victims agree. This week, Barry Amundson, whose brother Craig was killed in the Pentagon that day, said his group — September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows — thought all of the money should go to benefit Afghans.

    “I can’t think of a worse betrayal of the people of Afghanistan than to freeze their assets and give it to 9/11 families,” Mr. Amundson said.

    Furthermore, largely because of Biden’s revenge, “the value of the Afghan currency has plummeted, and with it, the ability of millions of people who were already living on the edge to buy enough food to eat. … The situation has rapidly grown dire.”

    Also on February 11th, the Moon of Alabama blogger headlined “When Cruelty Is The Point – U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People”, and he explained the Biden Administration’s legal argument, and concluded that, “To give money that is owned by Afghanistan’s central bank and is needed to help Afghan people to relatives of people who died in 9/11 is completely unjustified.” But Biden is trying to find a way to get it done.

    Moreover, though Trump started the policy of stealing Syria’s oil, that barbaric policy has continued under Biden, such as has been reported here and here and here. America is now all-out a gangster-country, but it arrogantly pontificates ‘morality’ to the whole world.  And it’s the ONLY country (except its 2014 coup-grabbed vassal, Ukraine), that at the U.N. votes (and repeatedly) against resolutions to condemn nazism and racism. Even if there might possibly be another country’s Government that is as evil as America’s is, there is none that compares with the U.S. Government for the number and barbarism of its sanctions, coups, subversions, and outright military invasions (all being against countries that never threatened America, far less invaded it), nor for the U.S. Government’s sheer hypocrisy: it’s by far the worst international gangster.

    So: what Biden is doing to Afghanistan is really just par for the course. And, just as the U.S. public in 2002-3 were overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government’s (and newsmedia’s) lies against Iraq that led to the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. public still are overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government’s (and news media’s) lies against Russia and China in 2022 — apparently, once a fool, always a fool, and most people are fools. Even the outright cruelty of America’s leaders can’t shake the public’s trusting “their” Government (and that ‘their’ links to identifying whom it actually represents — the billionaires, the people who have doubled their wealth during covid-19 while everybody else has become less wealthy than before — and that group are also the world’s most rapacious individuals, and are also the most corrupt, and the most corrupting).

    Before one can understand a problem, one must first know what the problem actually is. America’s public don’t know what the problem is, because the people who are the problem don’t want them to.

    The post Biden’s Bottomless Cruelty to Afghans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Taliban have detained 29 women and their families in Kabul, says US envoy

    Report by senior diplomat Rina Amiri raises concerns about number of ‘unjust detentions’ in Afghanistan

    The Taliban have detained 29 women and their families in Kabul, a senior US diplomat said on Saturday, adding to concerns about rising numbers of people seized and held indefinitely in Afghanistan.

    Rina Amiri, US special envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights, said that women were among 40 people seized on Friday. “These unjust detentions must stop,” she said in a tweet.

    Continue reading…

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

  • When Cruelty Is The Point – U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People

    The U.S. also froze the $7+ billion reserve funds of the central bank of Afghanistan which have been held in New York. This is the Afghan peoples money. Part of the total funds are reserves that private Afghan banks had deposited with the central bank. It is money that ordinary Afghan people had deposited at those private banks.

    Now the Biden administration, ignoring the various owners of those funds, has decided to steal all of them.

    The post When Cruelty Is The Point – U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Rep. Ilhan Omar Slams Biden Plan to Seize Afghan Assets to Give to 9/11 Victims

    People wait to receive aid provided by a charity on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 30, 2022.

    As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday led condemnation of a reported Biden administration plan to permanently seize $7 billion of currently frozen Afghan assets and distribute half to relatives of 9/11 victims, advocates pointed to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and urged President Joe Biden to change course.

    Noting that “there wasn’t a single Afghan” among the 9/11 hijackers — and the U.S. gives billions of dollars to the Saudi and Egyptian governments despite their “direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists” — Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that punishing millions of starving people is “unconscionable.”

    Omar said she agrees with Barry Amundson — a member of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost his brother in the Pentagon attack — who warned the proposed seizure would “cause further harm to innocent Afghans.”

    “That’s exactly what will happen,” Omar tweeted.

    Khaled Beydoun, an Egyptian-American scholar, tweeted: “This is theft. Graft. Amid famine, no less.”

    “Newsflash: Zero of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan,” he added. “This is absurd.”

    The advocacy group Afghans for A Better Tomorrow said in a statement that the proposed redistribution of Afghan funds “is short-sighted, cruel, and will worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation.”

    “Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan,” the group — which is circulating a petition aimed at convincing the administration to immediately unfreeze some of the funds — asserted.

    Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and who is also with Peaceful Tomorrows, was among those urging Biden to reject the proposed policy.

    “President Biden has the opportunity to make amends right now! He can unfreeze the funds belonging to the Afghan people,” she said. “They are not the Taliban’s property but of everyday folks like us. Let’s see this as a humanitarian crisis that we can address immediately.”

    Others noted the dire conditions the Afghan people are currently enduring.

    Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American author and activist with Unfreeze Afghanistan, said that Afghans are “experiencing a historic famine within a pandemic, and their economy has been in a freefall worse than the Great Depression.”

    “One of the main drivers of the economic collapse is the freezing of their assets,” she added. “If the funds are not returned and the famine is not averted, America will be blamed for one of the worst famines in history.”

    Rodriguez said that “it saddens me that there are 9/11 family members who can’t see the discrepancies in our relative privilege to demand reparations instead of recognizing the dire need of Afghans.”

    “They have suffered unjustly for the actions of a cadre of extremists — a tiny minority of the population,” she continued. “Major famine, disease, displacement, and destruction that our government and its allies created should be reversed through all means possible.”

    Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, said in a statement that “taking funds that rightfully belong to some of the poorest people in the world who are now facing a catastrophic famine is a cruel move that will not bring justice to the 9/11 families.”

    Referencing the U.S. occupation that Biden ended last year as the Taliban retook the country, Benjamin tweeted that taking “billions of dollars away from starving Afghans” would be “a fitting end to 20 years of screwing the Afghan people.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Thank You for Hearing Our Afghan Pain”

    During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

    But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

    When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

    They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

    Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

    After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion dollars of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

    These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

    Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

    “Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”

    Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”

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

    For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

    After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

    The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

    “After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”

    Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

    Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

    The post “Thank You for Hearing Our Afghan Pain” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Love To Afghanistan

    This Valentine’s Day, we are organizing “Love to Afghanistan” vigils across the country to promote much-needed aid to the people of Afghanistan.

    We will be pressuring members of Congress to increase aid to Afghanistan and end the sanctions policies and asset freezes that humanitarian groups say are driving the current famine.

    The post Love To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Why the Taliban won

    Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes, published seven years before the Taliban took control of Kabul for a second time in 2021, helps explain their victory, writes Chris Slee. 

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • US Sanctions Caused Mass Civilian Deaths in Iraq. Afghan Civilians Are Up Next.

    A woman wearing a burqa carries an infant as she waits with others for free bread in front of a bakery in Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 24, 2022.

    One million Afghan children may die from starvation over the next several months, according to the United Nations. Nearly 23 million Afghans are facing “crisis levels of hunger” and 8.7 million are on the “brink of starvation.” This mass hunger has rendered millions of Afghans on the “verge of death,” according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Alongside looming mass starvation, Afghans face below-freezing temperatures, severe shortages of life-saving medical supplies, and extreme poverty, making conditions in Afghanistan among the gravest of human rights crises on Earth.

    This is not a natural disaster, nor is it the result of conflict internal to Afghanistan. This a human-made humanitarian catastrophe. United States-made, specifically.

    The U.S.-allied Afghan government, most recently under the rule of Ashraf Ghani, was heavily dependent on foreign aid. Following the Taliban takeover in mid-August 2021, the Biden administration and the UN Security Council instituted devastating sanctions, sharply reducing foreign aid. The Biden administration froze 9.5 billion dollars’ worth of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, roughly equivalent to 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

    Journalists Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota recently reported that the White House has “urged European partners and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to similarly starve the nation of capital.” This has led to the total collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, creating “an almost globally unprecedented level of economic shock.” Unemployment has skyrocketed, and the country’s health care infrastructure has been decimated.

    As experts have noted, more Afghans are poised to die from U.S. sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and U.S. military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, U.S. establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the U.S. has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports.

    These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians. The respected international diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, led the first UN delegation to Iraq shortly after the imposition of sanctions. The delegation reported that, “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country.” The sanctions had produced “near apocalyptic results.”

    Two years later, the World Food Program reported that the continuing sanctions had “virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment, [and] widespread human suffering…. A grave humanitarian tragedy is unfolding.”

    The consequences of the sanctions for Iraq’s health care system were dramatic. Journalist Jeremy Scahill extensively covered Iraq under these sanctions and reported that, “Every pediatric hospital felt like a death row for infants.” Highly trained Iraqi doctors had the knowledge to save these infants, but the sanctions blocked them from acquiring basic medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, forcing doctors to reuse syringes multiples times and ultimately watch children die of perfectly treatable ailments. Iraqi hospitals “reeked of gasoline,” Scahill recalled, since desperate doctors were forced to substitute gasoline for sterilizer, disinfectant and bleach.

    UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday resigned his post in protest of the sanctions after serving as a UN diplomat for more than 30 years. During his resignation, he told the press that, “four thousand to five thousand children are dying unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet and the bad internal health situation.” He went on to label the U.S.-imposed sanctions “genocide.” His successor, German Diplomat Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in protest after fewer than two years, calling the sanctions a “true human tragedy that needs to be ended.”

    A report by the UN Commission on Human Rights studying the impact of the sanctions on Iraq estimated the civilian death toll to be in the “range from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children.” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was confronted with this shocking statistic on “60 Minutes,” which led to this now-infamous exchange:

    Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half-a-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

    Madelaine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice. But the price — we think — the price is worth it.

    During this era of sanctions, then-Sen. Joe Biden was a member, and eventually chair, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances. The same cannot be said for Samantha Power.

    Power is the current head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who was brought into the Biden administration to be a champion of human rights, “lifting up the vulnerable” and “ushering in a new era of human progress and development,” according to Biden’s nomination statement. Power was the founding director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, served as the Obama administration’s UN ambassador, and has a long list of human rights accolades. The nomination of this “human rights crusader,” as Politico put it, was widely praised in the human rights community. Yet Power’s record on U.S. imposed sanctions — first in scholarship and then practice — is abysmal.

    In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, describes the U.S. response to genocides of the 20th century, arguing that U.S. power should have been used to prevent atrocities and protect civilians. In the chapters surveying the 1990s, Power condemns the Clinton administration’s failure to intervene in Rwanda, intervene soon enough in the Balkans, and use U.S. military force to curb atrocities elsewhere.

    Yet the U.S. sanctions regime that caused mass devastation to Iraqi civilians was conspicuously absent — it does not get a single mention in the book. For someone so dedicated to using U.S. power to protect civilians and stop atrocities, Power’s silence on the hundreds of thousands of children dead from U.S. sanctions is telling. Power is unrelenting — and rightfully so — in her condemnation of human rights abuses carried out by other countries. Yet even though the death toll of the U.S.-imposed sanctions rivaled or even exceeded the contemporaneous atrocities and genocides Power depicted in her book, when the U.S. was the perpetrator, she was silent. Unfortunately, her silence on sanctions, and their devastating human consequences, persists.

    Power, as administrator of USAID, is now an active participant in the starvation of Afghan civilians. In response to pleas from the UN and humanitarian organizations working in Afghanistan, USAID increased humanitarian aid. But as experts have noted, meagerly increasing aid while imposing devastating sanctions and freezing nearly all of Afghanistan’s foreign assets will do nearly nothing to stop the “unprecedented level of economic shock.” There is near consensus among numerous humanitarian coordinators that the only way to curb the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and prevent furthering the major humanitarian disaster already underway is to lift the sanctions. Unfortunately, Power, the celebrated defender of human rights, refuses to call for a lifting of the sanctions, and instead remains uncritical.

    The devastating human toll of sanctions on Iraqi civilians in the ‘90s is a grim warning for what lies ahead if current U.S. policy continues. The Clinton administration’s sanctions caused mass death and suffering, and the Biden administration is dangerously close to following in their footsteps. The “human rights hawks” who lamented the humanitarian consequences of the fall of Kabul are now silent in the face of U.S.-imposed mass starvation, and the “human rights crusader” within the administration is complicit.

    We must listen to the chorus of humanitarian organizations and pressure the Biden administration to immediately lift the sanctions before it is too late. Afghans have suffered at the hands of the U.S. for long enough.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Sanctions On Afghanistan Could Be Deadlier Than 20 Years Of War

    Economic sanctions have, in recent years, become one of the most important tools of U.S. foreign policy. There are currently more than 20 countries subjected to various sanctions from the U.S. government.

    But if more Americans knew how many innocent civilians actually die as a result of these sanctions, would the worst of them be permitted?

    We may be about to find out in Afghanistan. Sanctions currently imposed on the country are on track to take the lives of more civilians in the coming year than have been killed by 20 years of warfare. There’s no hiding it any more.

    The post US Sanctions On Afghanistan Could Be Deadlier Than 20 Years Of War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.