Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– More than three years have passed since US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, putting an end to an occupation that lasted two decades. With the Taliban back in power, the rights of women and girls have suffered a severe setback. Under the Taliban’s rule, they are no longer allowed to attend public secondary schools and universities. Last September, the fundamentalist group issued a religious code banning women from raising their voices or reciting the Quran in public.

Political and media freedoms have also been severely restricted, and poverty and unemployment have increased amid a massive withdrawal of foreign aid. The war’s end has brought public security and access to rural areas has improved, but these benefits are often denied to the female half of society. Women are forbidden to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Amin Saikal, an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), is the author of “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan”. The US, explains Saikal, had traditionally paid limited attention to Afghanistan. This changed with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, after which the Carter administration approached Afghanistan as having ‘strategic importance’. Under Carter’s successor, Reagan, the US lavished Pakistan and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with military and financial assistance.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 gave way to a period of profound internal strife that culminated with the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996. Saikal defines the Clinton administration’s approach to the Taliban as “full of ambiguity.”[1] On the one hand, it maintained informal contact with the group. On the other hand, it feared the Taliban’s alliance with Al-Qaeda, founded by former mujahidin Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, would put an end to this era of ambiguity.

According to Saikal, the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan following 9/11 assumed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be defeated, and Afghanistan changed, with limited combat and economic investment. The ‘light footprint’ approach, however, soon morphed into a ‘heavy footprint’ one. Saikal lists several reasons for this. First, the US underestimated the complexity of intervening in Afghanistan. Second, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden at the beginning of the war led to an obsession with finding him. Third, the Bush administration greatly expanded its priorities in Afghanistan, where it now wanted to engage in ‘democracy promotion’ and a ‘war on terror.’

Reflecting on two decades of war in Afghanistan, former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt noted that after the Taliban were overthrown, there would have been a theoretical possibility for a political settlement including the fundamentalist group. But the US would not have accepted this, nor the Northern Alliance armed groups the US had supported to depose the Taliban, remarks Bildt.

It is highly doubtful that the US ever had a real chance at achieving its declared objectives in Afghanistan. Saikal, however, believes this was possible. According to him, a key problem was that “Afghanistan’s conditions required from the outset a much larger appropriate military and reconstruction involvement than what unfolded.”[2] The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to an opposite trend, as the US transferred resources to the new war theater.

Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan< (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click Here to Buy.

Saikal considers that the constitutional structure adopted by Afghanistan in 2004 had profound flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralized. The strong presidency established in the constitution led to the domination of the executive over the legislative and judicial powers. It was also responsible for a winner-takes-all mentality that left many strongmen with little formal power but the capacity to spoil the country’s politics and security. Saikal spares no criticism for the two men who presided over Afghanistan during this period, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

About Karzai, Saikal writes that he “invoked the constitution and stressed the importance of the rule of law only when they suited his political and power needs.”[3] The emeritus professor describes Karzai’s government as highly corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking a clear ideological project. Initially lauded in Western capitals, Afghanistan’s Western partners were only too happy to see Karzai leave his position in 2014. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was elected after a voting process that saw even more fraud than the previous presidential election in 2009.

Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a mediation effort between Ghani, the official winner of the 2014 election, and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed to have won the vote. The impasse was resolved in favor of Ghani, who had better connections in Western countries after having spent more than a decade of his life in the US. Ghani, explains Saikal, sought to present himself as a traditional Muslim and Afghan but “ultimately could not be the man of the people.”[4]

The new president also generated resentment among other ethnic groups when he surrounded himself with fellow Pashtuns. Ghani presided over a continuous loss of territories to the Taliban. Although he had promised never to leave the country, he abandoned Kabul as the Taliban were completing its conquest of Afghanistan in August 2021.  

In his balance of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan, Saikal notes that the country’s economy remained dependent on foreign aid, opium cultivation, and the black-market sector. Infrastructural projects and investments in the health and education sectors significantly improved the overall situation in the country. Still, the improvements bore no proportion with the money spent — $36 billion was allocated to governance and development, with smaller amounts for humanitarian aid, in a figure that does not include contributions by US allies.

US funds were misappropriated by both Americans and Afghans, while mismanagement, wastage, and corruption resulted in Afghanistan seeing “only artificial, not structural, economic development.”[5] The area where improvements were more significant, especially in comparison to the periods that preceded and followed the US intervention, was women’s rights. Even so, the gains were too often restricted to urban areas.

The 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban was the prelude to the US exit from Afghanistan. The negotiations, handled on behalf of the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalilzad (who had played a major role in Bush’s Afghanistan policy), were “disastrous”, in Saikal’s words.[6] The emeritus professor argues that Khalilzad, under Trump’s imperative, was so concerned about reaching a quick agreement that he made too many concessions considering that the Taliban did not have control over many areas of Afghanistan at that time.

Under the terms of the Doha Agreement, the US promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in fourteen months whereas the Taliban committed themselves not to attack US and allied troops. The Taliban also agreed not to allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. That they were not ready to keep this promise became evident when a US drone strike killed al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul one year after US troops had left Afghanistan.

“How to Lose a War” is the result of Saikal’s decades-long study of Afghanistan’s history and politics. He had access to some of the most prominent politicians and military men, both Afghan and foreign, who shaped Afghanistan during the last two decades. Saikal combines these insider sources with a clear analytical mind in a text that will prove a fruitful read not only for experts but also for those who have been following international politics less closely.

It would be a positive development if the book contributed to renewing the current conversation on Afghanistan, which has moved to the background since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. One of the current discussions concerning Afghanistan is how foreign governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions should engage with the Taliban-led country. Saikal pays little attention to the topic in his book, but this is a debate that is likely to stay with us for a long time since there is no realistic chance of the Taliban losing power in the short term.

In his book “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left”, Hassan Abbas argues that it is vital “to acknowledge the difference between engagement and endorsement”.[7] Abbas sees engagement as a way to better understand the interests and actions of the other side, in this case, the Taliban. Endorsement, on the contrary, would mean supporting the Taliban’s worldview. Whereas endorsement arises from affinity, engagement is born out of pragmatism. Abbas is convinced that engagement with the Taliban is possible and much-needed, even if the gains to be made are limited.

Graeme Smith, the Afghanistan Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, makes a similar argument. He notes that, when engaging the Taliban diplomatically, the rights of women and girls cannot be dropped from the conversation. At the same time, however, the international sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover has counter-productive results as they “do not have much effect on the Taliban, but they do drive up rates of malnutrition among children and disease among vulnerable families, especially female-headed households that often struggle in a patriarchal society.”

Smith reports that some European countries that publicly chastise the Taliban have sent discreet delegations to Afghanistan to confer about security issues. Calling the Taliban out for their transgressions while seeking to ease the suffering of the Afghan population and limiting the danger of international terrorism emerging from Afghanistan is a very complicated endeavor. It does not need to be hypocritical, though.

 Notes

[1] Amin Saikal, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 61.

[2] Ibid., p. 201.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid, p. 169.

[6] Ibid., p. 214.

[7] Hassan Abbas, “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 210.

(The Conversation) – The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was a blow for education across the country – but especially for girls and women. Since then, the Taliban’s leaders have outlawed education for girls after sixth grade, expanded religious seminaries known as madrasas ninefold and reintroduced corporal punishment in schools.

Now, the Taliban are continuing their assault on education for both boys and girls by changing the curriculum in grades 1-12. They have already revised textbooks up to eighth grade, and they’re on track to finish the rest within months. After completion, the revised curriculum will go up for approval by the Taliban’s supreme leader and will likely be followed by swift implementation. The process is straightforward. The supreme leader of the Taliban controls education policy – including the curriculum. Once submitted to him, he has no reason to reject or delay the implementation.

As an educational policy scholar who pushed for educational progress in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, I believe these changes echo the tactics of the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s to impose an ideology through textbooks. They also reflect the stifling climate of the 1990s, which promoted violence and suppressed critical thinking in education. By controlling education, the Taliban aims to instill their totalitarian and extremist religious-based ideology in young minds, ensuring their grip on power for generations to come.

The curriculum changes

Afghanistan’s education system is centralized, meaning all schools follow a single curriculum. The current textbooks are the result of two decades of reforms that followed the country’s recovery from the Soviet invasion and civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2001, when the Taliban’s last regime fell, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with international developmental agencies, undertook a critical revision of the national curriculum. This initiative aimed to make curriculum and textbooks inclusive, nondiscriminatory and free from promotion of violence – a departure from previous textbooks that included illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers and automatic weapons.

In the last decade before the Taliban regained power, the Ministry of Education was still attempting to reform curriculum to focus on students’ personal and economic growth. Unfortunately, the ministry never completed the reforms.

Embed from Getty Images
Afghan school boys attend their first class following the start of the new academic year, at a private school in Khost on March 20, 2024. Schools in Afghanistan opened for the new academic year on March 20, the education ministry said, with girls banned from joining secondary-level classes for the third year in a row. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Within a few months after their takeover in August 2021, senior Taliban leaders criticized the previous education system and curriculum, saying it was brainwashing Afghan youth and weakening religious values. They called for a reeducation campaign.

Since then, the Taliban have been revising the curriculum and aggressively rewriting textbooks for grades 1-12. This is based on 26 recommendations from their education commission. Some of the changes approved by the commission include:

1.) Removing subjects like formal art, civil education and culture. Instead, schools are increasing time spent on religious studies.

2.) Removing content about human rights, women’s rights, equal rights, freedoms, elections and democracy.

3.) Removing all images of living beings from textbooks, including pictures of humans, animals, sports and anatomy. The Taliban believe that only God creates living beings, and producing or distributing images of God’s creation is prohibited.

4.) Adding religious material to the curriculum that enforces Taliban narratives. This includes teachings that justify violence against those who resist or oppose the Taliban’s views.

5.) Shaping student behaviors to fit the Taliban’s vision of society, similar to what they defined in recent vice and virtue laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, among other rules.

6.) Requiring schools to teach and assess students on “emirate studies,” which glorify Taliban leaders and their history by characterizing the Taliban takeover as a defeat of secular values, including equal rights, civil society and democracy.

The Taliban have also banned women from studying abroad. In addition, they have prohibited the sale, purchase and reprinting of more than 400 science and philosophy books and confiscated at least 50,000 books on democracy, social and civil rights, art, literature and poetry from publishing houses, bookstores and public libraries.

A 2023 Human Rights Watch report noted an increase in corporal punishment in schools. Even some teachers of nonreligious subjects, like math and science, now have to pass the religious tests to remain employed.

Beyond shaping thought processes, the Taliban aim to influence students’ actions. Through rigid rules and corporal punishments – including humiliation, beating, slapping and foot whipping – they seek to produce immediate behavioral changes that reflect their desired norms. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate individuals who embody the regime’s values and ideologies.

Consequences for Afghan students – and the world

During their first regime from 1995-2001, the Taliban used textbooks with biased content that promoted violent jihad. For example, the alphabet taught to first graders included teachings like “J” stands for jihad and “M” for mujahideen – referring to Islamic guerrilla fighters.

They increased religious education to 50% of the curriculum and banned art, music and photography. They deemed music against God’s will, according to their interpretation of Sharia.

As a result, academic freedom vanished. Student enrollment dropped. Families lost trust in schools, and many teachers left the profession, leading to the eventual collapse of the education system in the 1990s.

The Taliban are threatening to do the same today with their latest curriculum changes. Schools may turn into indoctrination centers instead of places for real learning. I fear that the altered curriculum could breed mistrust in public education. Furthermore, the Taliban removed the 2008 law that made school mandatory. As a result, many parents may pull their kids from schools again.

The ideologically driven curriculum also raises international concerns and has already led to cuts in foreign aid. Donors won’t support institutions that promote discriminatory ideologies. This is straining an already vulnerable education system, threatening its survival.

Ultimately, the Afghan people will bear the brunt of these policies, but the effects could spill beyond the country’s borders and impact the world.

Enayat Nasir, Doctoral Research Assistant in Educational Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The EU has begun a probe into Chinese wind turbine companies. Then-Commission Executive Vice-President for Competition Margarethe Vestager warned that a wave of subsidised Chinese wind turbine exports: “is not only dangerous for our competitiveness. It also jeopardises our economic security.” The EU remains scarred by its loss of a trade war to China over the bloc’s solar power industry a decade earlier. Western governments and activists have also expressed concerns that China’s green sector is tied to human rights abuses like forced labour in Xinjiang.

In the Middle East, however, many governments remain open to Chinese green sector exports and have struck commercial agreements to gain investment from its major firms. In July, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund struck joint investment deals with Chinese solar power companies Jinko Solar and TCL Zhonghuan. Meanwhile, Saudi investment business ALGIHAZ signed a contract to build an energy storage facility with Chinese company Sungrow. The Australian Griffith Asia Institute calculated that altogether Chinese firms worked on green energy projects across the Middle East worth about $9.5 billion over 2018-2023.

Middle Eastern States Piggyback Off China

China’s government and Chinese state-owned or state-linked companies have been able to offer commercial and political advantages to Middle Eastern governments seeking to decarbonize their economies. Western engineering and manufacturing firms’ projects are regulated by numerous rules intended to prevent corruption, environmental harm and other negative development outcomes. Chinese companies under the direction of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face no such restraints, though the quality of the infrastructure they have produced under China’s signature Belt & Road Project (BRI) initiative has varied. For autocratic Middle Eastern governments like the Gulf monarchies, however, Chinese companies have the ability to build high-technology critical infrastructure without the need to appease external stakeholders like the human rights groups or independent media outlets found in Western countries.

“Xi of Arabia,”

Chinese companies are also generally happy to operate in a Middle Eastern business environment that still often relies on patronage to get deals done. The CCP has cultivated particularly close ties with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Algeria, with whose governments Beijing has signed comprehensive strategic partnerships (the most elevated type of bilateral agreement with China). These relationships have borne increasing fruit as the BRI has matured and new technology has widened the appeal of clean energy and other green industries. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia have belatedly woken up to the threat of climate change and their own potential ability to take advantage of clean energy like solar power.

Doing Deals to Decarbonize

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Beijing in June. Xi promised his government would cooperate more closely with the Arab country on a range of industries including “information technology, artificial intelligence, the digital economy, and new energy.” China was already the UAE’s biggest trading partner in 2022 while the Arab state was Beijing’s biggest Arab trading partner, the UAE’s economy ministry said in 2023. While renewable energy development is only one aspect of the burgeoning diplomatic and trading relationship between the two sides, it is an important consideration for the UAE and its Net Zero 2050 strategy to decarbonize the country’s economy. Given China’s private sector is subordinate to the political aims of the ruling CCP, further Chinese green investment is likely to flow to the UAE in 2025. The UAE is also investing in renewables in East Asia, with its green energy firm Masdar aiming to install 2 gigawatts of renewable power in ASEAN countries by 2025. The firm was invited by the Philippines government to invest in Manila’s green sector too.

In May, the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, said “new energy” and “critical minerals” were among the areas the country was interested in engaging with Beijing. Chinese CEOs held meetings with UAE officials in July following the UAE president’s state visit to discuss bilateral cooperation in various areas, including solar power and renewable energy. The UAE’s example is being replicated by other Middle Eastern governments with whom China has cultivated close relations. At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in September, Egypt signed agreements worth more than $1.1 billion with Chinese companies, which included the country’s first green chemical plant. China’s Befar Group will build a $500 million facility powered energy sources including natural gas, wind and solar energy. A second deal involves the creation of a $100 million solar panel factory. Chinese companies are building solar power plants in Algeria and becoming investors and co-investors in Saudi and UAE solar and wind projects as these two countries decarbonise their power grids.

China Seeks to Refute Dumping Narratives

Meanwhile, Middle Eastern demand for Chinese clean energy infrastructure and products allows Beijing to claim it is not engaged in overproduction in sectors like EV manufacturing or renewable energy products and dumping the resulting excess on foreign markets. Much criticism of Chinese trade practices in the country’s green industries has come from the US and other Western governments. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in April that excess Chinese manufacturing capacity in sectors like EVs and solar panels was intensifying. Chinese state media and CEOs like the head of vehicle manufacturer Great Wall Motor International have denied this, although non-Western countries like Turkey have also imposed tariffs on Chinese exports like EVs. China has taken Turkey to the World Trade Organization in response.

Trade tensions between China and governments under pressure to restrict Chinese green technology exports are likely to endure in many parts of the world. In the Middle East, however, Beijing and local regimes continue to discover synergies between their development needs. China’s sluggish economy and growing trade tensions with the Global North have left it in need of new markets for its goods. Meanwhile, Middle Eastern governments need the country’s know-how and deep pockets if they are to overhaul their own 20^th-century fossil fuel infrastructure and create new jobs in the emerging green economies of the 21^st century. 

Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian “Ocean-24” exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”

“China is not a future threat,” the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”

Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.

Building a Pacific Bastion

For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.

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Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.

For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.

After the Cold War

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the U.S. Navy declined from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the U.S. would enjoy what the Pentagon called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”

After the September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started building bases in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are rife, and expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful American Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.

In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama proclaimed a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the American military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some U.S. forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House deployed a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five Philippine bases near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at Jeju Island on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon planned to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.

Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific region. After proclaiming “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”

Responding to such pressure, the Trump administration added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon budget, which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Still, setting aside support ships, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s largest navy with 234 “warships,” while the U.S. deployed 219 — with Chinese combat capacity, according to American Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”

Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.

Military Cooperation with the Philippines

After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars, and the Cold War, American relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991 when that country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the U.S. 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.

After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to ground a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington, allowing the U.S. military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.

Although Manila won a unanimous ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “without lawful effect,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from America and a strategic tilt toward China, which that country rewarded with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was operating anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers, and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.

Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, U.S. Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest military maneuvers ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the U.S. deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range Missile Launcher capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter complaint from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”

Manila has matched its new commitment to the U.S. alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to purchase five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos cruise missiles from India under a $375 million contract, and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will result in 10 new naval vessels. After the government announced a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean suppliers to procure 40 modern jet fighters — a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational jets.

Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation maneuvers in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations — Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States.

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue

While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed U.S. relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., first launched in 2007, has now extended American military power into the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 ASEAN summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump decided to revive the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour governments cozied up to China).

Just last month, President Biden hosted a “Quad Summit” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly said: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry replied: “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”

Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar (India) naval exercise into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India announced that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it, the Quad is “here to stay.”

AUKUS Alliance

While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. (part of what Michael Klare has called the “Anglo-Saxonization” of American foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders announced that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France called the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately recalled its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”

To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Now, through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the United States and will gain access to British submarine designs and top-secret U.S. nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.

Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.

Stand-Off Along the Pacific Littoral

Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the U.S. rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines, making them once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for American global power in the Pacific.

Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the United States, China’s advantage in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, America’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)

Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America’s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits hundreds of times monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever America’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.

As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-American nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current Labour Party government has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the United States, Republican populism, whether Donald Trump’s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia-Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan, or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.

And that, of course, might be the good news (so to speak), given the possibility that a growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and leading to the possibility of a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably dangerous and destructive.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

The survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of whom there are still 106,825, were known as Hibakusha, literally “bombing victims.” They were often stigmatized by other Japanese and sometimes had complicated love lives. Some had disfiguring burns on their bodies or faces. They were thought to be at special risk of dying young from the effects of the nuclear weapons, and so had trouble finding mates. Some Hibakusha hid their past. Some of those willing to come out of the closet formed organizations to lobby for the banning of nuclear weapons.

Friday evening it was announced that Nihon Hidankyo, which Asahi Shimbun glosses as “the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations,” has won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, hung over the victory. According to the Irish Times’s David McNeill in Tokyo, when Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, watched the ceremony in Oslo on television and discovered that his organization had won, he said tearfully, “It can’t be real, I felt so sure it would be the people of Gaza.”

Mr. Mimaki’s certainty that the “people of Gaza” would compete successfully for the Nobel with the survivors of a nuclear attack speaks volumes about how the genocide is viewed outside the North Atlantic world. And, to be sure, the sheer tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza since October 2023 has exceeded that of the two atomic bombs deployed in 1945.

Mimaki accepted the award on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo and gave an acceptance speech in which he pointed out that “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists. For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.” At the press conference, Mr Mimaki went on to compare the plight of Gazan children to that of Japanese children at the end of the Second World War.

He observed, “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”

Mimaki added, “When it comes to Israel and the Middle East, regardless of the specifics, the underlying issue is conflict and the act of doing things that people abhor. Firstly, it is about killing people. This idea of killing others before being killed oneself —- that is essentially what war is. Also, war involves destroying homes, demolishing buildings, and taking down bridges. These actions constitute war. Japan, too, fought a major war 80 years ago, and it is said that 3 million people lost their lives. Since then, we have upheld our constitution, aiming for a world without war. I hope Japan can become a leader in promoting peace globally.” (- ChatGPT translation of the computer-generated YouTube transcript.)

He also said, “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists . . . For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”

The situation in Gaza is therefore very much on Mr. Mimaki’s mind, and on the minds of other Japanese pacifists. They see civilian cities reduced to rubble from the sky and bleeding children in the arms of their parents, and it takes them right back to August 6, 1945.

“Nuking Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

About 140,000 people were incinerated when the U.S. deployed an atomic bomb against Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and three days later, some 74,000 more were turned into carbon dust in Nagasaki.

Gilad Cohen, Israel’s ambassador to Japan, criticized Mimaki’s heartfelt sentiments, saying on “X,” that Miyaki’s comparison “is outrageous and baseless.” He added, “Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization committing a double war crime: targeting Israeli civilians, including women and children, while using its own people as human shields.” He accused Miyaki of dishonoring the victims of October 7.

Cohen, however, is the one who misunderstands the similarities here. The Truman administration viewed Imperial Japan and generals such as Hideki Tojo (who also served as prime minister during much of the war) as murderous terrorists who had launched a sneak attack that killed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor, including some 68 civilians.

As for Hamas being responsible for all the Palestinian deaths in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military (!), that is a similar argument to the one made by Truman regarding Japan. It was necessary to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, because the US could lose as many as a quarter of a million troops in an invasion of Japan, since the Japanese would unitedly defend the island. In essence, all the Japanese formed a human shield against any ground incursion. Therefore, it was the refusal to surrender of the former admiral, Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, that made the US kill those 214,000 civilians.

The devil made me do it, is the refrain of all genocidaires.

Mr. Mimaki will have none of it. He condemns belligerent actions whoever takes them. But most importantly, he knows a crime against humanity when he sees one.

According to the UAE’s al-Khaleej, Wang told Pezeshkian, “No matter how the international and regional situation develops, China will always be a reliable partner of Iran.” This statement seems to have been intended to reassure Tehran in the wake of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, where the Hezbollah party-militia is a close ally of Iran.

Wang continued, “China will continue to support Iran in maintaining its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and national dignity.” He insisted that China will take a strong stand against all those who “interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and impose sanctions.” The latter is a slam at the United States.

Wang is not only the foreign minister but also serves on the 24-member Chinese Communist Party Politburo

Iraq’s Shafaq newspaper reports that China is more dependent than in the past on Iranian and Russian petroleum exports. About 17% of its oil comes from Iran now. These two countries have cut their prices for China and so have displaced Saudi Arabia and Iraq as the largest oil exporters to China.

China is investing billions in the Iranian economy, especially in the transportation and industrial sectors.

On Monday, Yi had met with his Lebanese counterpart Abdallah Bou Habib (a Christian), and attacked Israel for its invasion of Lebanon, Lebanon’s al-Ghad News reports.

Wang pledged that no matter what changes take place, China will persevere in standing “on the side of justice and on the side of our Arab brothers, including Lebanon.”

Wang added, “We are closely following developments in the regional situation, especially the recent detonation of telecommunications equipment in Lebanon, and we firmly oppose indiscriminate attacks on civilians.”

He expressed the conviction that replying to violence with more violence will just lead to increased humanitarian catastrophes in the region. He called for a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of forces (including, he seemed to say, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied Palestinian territories), so that a two-state solution can be practically implemented.

For his part, Pezeshkian addressed the UNGA on Wednesday concerning the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, saying that the global community must urgently halt the violence and establish a lasting armistice immediately, bringing an end to Israel’s extreme brutality in Lebanon before it incites further chaos in the region and across the globe.

The Iranian president implied that the Israelis are now attacking Lebanon in a bid to cover up their failures in Gaza and the loss of their myth of invincibility. He vowed that the “indiscriminate and terroristic actions of recent days, along with the extensive aggression against Lebanon, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent individuals, will not go unpunished.”

He implicitly slammed the US for forestalling any international effort to resolve the appalling crisis, while posing as a champion of human rights.

He said that the only solution was to reinstate the Palestinians’ right to self-determination through a referendum in which all Palestinians, including expatriates in the diaspora, could participate. This is a reference to Iran’s long-standing proposal for a one-party state in which both Palestinians and Israelis could vote equally. He concluded, “Only through this approach can Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexist harmoniously in a united land, free from racism and segregation.”

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

South China Morning Post: “China voices support for Lebanon as Israeli strikes kill hundreds”

(The Conversation) – Last month, the Taliban passed a new “vice and virtue” law, making it illegal for women to speak in public. Under the law, women can also be punished if they are heard singing or reading aloud from within their homes.

It was approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and will be enforced by the Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.

Ahead of an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year, the United Nations’ mission head for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said it would “take time” for the Taliban to accept women. The Taliban specifically mandated no women attend the conference, which the UN agreed to.

But as gender experts have been saying for years, Taliban leaders have not – and will not – change. Three years after they regained control of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s efforts to publicly erase women from Afghan society have reached a new low.

Gender apartheid

The Taliban’s burgeoning body of laws and practices restricting the rights of women and girls is a clear case of gender apartheid. Gender apartheid is defined as a regime of systematic gender-based oppression and domination.

Because there is no conventional legal framework in place in Afghanistan, the country is ruled by an increasingly tightly woven patchwork of decrees, policies and systematised practices, some written, others verbal.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has enacted more than 100 edicts, orders and directives restricting the rights of women and girls. These apply in a range of jurisdictions – nationally, provincially and in specific districts.

The most significant of these edicts prevent women and girls from attending school beyond grade six, working in many organisations, and travelling a certain distance to seek health care.

Restricting girls’ education

The ban on education for Afghan girls has had a dire effect on their wellbeing. Modelling from UN Women shows this has correlated with a 25% increase in child marriage and 45% increase in early childbirth. The loss of hope for young women has been profound.

Civil society groups in Afghanistan and around the world have clapped back at the Taliban’s ban on girl’s education with the hashtag “Let Afghan Girls Learn”.

Myriad small organisations are also running underground schools to continue girls’ education. Sometimes these schools operate under the guise of embroidery classes, or something else the Taliban finds acceptable.

But the ongoing lack of funding to women-led organisations has been a serious barrier to these kinds of programs, despite the fact they are primarily Afghan-led.

A range of internationally certified online programs have also been established, providing important educational and employment opportunities for smaller numbers of Afghan women and girls.

But these online options remain limited, and not just by funding. Data shows only 6% of Afghan women have internet access, and the Taliban is making it increasingly difficult for Afghans to access SIM cards for mobile phones.

Hurting women and children’s health

Women’s health has also suffered due to the brain drain of highly-skilled workers fleeing the country and the sharp reduction in international technical and financial assistance to Afghanistan’s public health system.

Human Rights Watch reports “women and girls have been disproportionately affected by the healthcare crisis” in the country, particularly because of the Taliban’s abuses of women’s rights.

For example, restrictions on women’s movement has meant that maternal and infant mortality rates have skyrocketed in recent years as women are prevented from reaching health facilities.

Data published in the British Medical Journal shows that eight in ten women in urban areas have reported symptoms of depression and/or anxiety living under the Taliban.

Fighting against the silence

Over the past year, the Taliban have also increasingly targeted women’s human rights defenders. Activists have been “disappeared”, arbitrarily detained, and egregiously abused in prison.

The Guardian recently published evidence of a woman being raped in prison.

In my own work, I’ve documented a pattern of Talibs using sexual torture against imprisoned women’s human rights defenders in a bid to shame them out of their activism and isolate them from familial and community support.

Yet, Afghan women continue to push back against the draconian authorities ruling the country.

In response to the latest “vice and virtue” law, for example, women all over the country have taken to social media posting videos of themselves singing and reciting poetry to show they cannot be silenced.

Some recite the Quran. Many wear traditional Afghan dress, while others wear the Taliban’s required burka. But they sing to prove they exist. To show they are Afghan, and that they are not impure, regardless of what the Talibs say.

Activists are also continuing to push for the international recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, and the International Criminal Court continues its investigations into alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Taliban.

But Afghan women cannot be left alone in their struggle. The international community must follow through on its commitments to protect Afghan women’s rights defenders. It must also maintain long-term support, including through funding pathways, for women-led organisations helping women in Afghanistan.

Susan Hutchinson, PhD Candidate, International Relations, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

‘Becoming a doctor is my dream’: Afghan women continue studies in Scotland | AFP

On Gaza, Harris said, “Well, let’s understand how we got here. On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. Many of them young people who were simply attending a concert. Women were horribly raped. And so absolutely, I said then, I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that. Work around the clock also understanding that we must chart a course for a two-state solution. And in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel. But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

But that isn’t how we got there. The Israelis expelled 250,000 Palestinians to Gaza in 1948 from their homes in what became southern Israel, making Gaza a big refugee camp. The population has grown to 2.2 million. They detached from Gaza its agricultural lands and left it cut off from its markets. From 1967 the Israelis came after the Palestinians in Gaza again and occupied them. In 2007 they slapped an economic siege on the Gaza Strip, imposing 55% unemployment and causing children to be malnourished. So Hamas committed horrific terrorism on civilians on October 7 last year, for which there can be no justification. But if it had only attacked the Israeli military it might have had grounds in international law, which permits resistance groups to fight foreign military occupation. Harris left out the Nakbah or Palestinian displacement by Israel, and the long decades of military occupation and siege, so she made the story impossible to understand.

She is much better than Biden in at least expressing some empathy for the tens of thousands of innocent civilians Israel has killed in Gaza. But empathy, while better than nothing, won’t stop the killing, which is daily and directly enabled by US supply of weapons and ammunition (the Israelis ran out months ago).

The cease-fire deal she is touting does not exist. It was just a cheap trick pulled on Biden by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to giving him breathing space to continue the war, Netanyahu has constantly tacked on new conditions, most recently his occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of Rafah, which he knows Hamas (and even Egypt) will never agree to.

There is no two-state solution to be had, and politicians should start being honest about it. Gaza is rubble and there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. Where would you put a state?

Trump’s response was to say that the war would not have happened on his watch because he starved Iran of money. That assertion is not true and it isn’t a policy. It is just a narcissistic boast that he can magically control the world. He can’t.

As usual, what he said is arrant nonsense. The CIA assesses that Hamas did not tell Iran it was planning Oct. 7. Iran had nothing to do with it.

Further, Biden has kept all the Trump sanctions on Iran, which is not a good thing. It puts the US on a war footing with Iran. Washington tries to interfere in Iran’s normal commerce such as selling its oil. There are no grounds in international law for this behavior. The US has even sanctioned the Iranian national bank, making all economic transactions with Iran a form of terrorism, including sending food or medicine. It is unprecedented to call the national bank of a country a terrorist organization.

Trump has no policies, just insults, such as that Harris hates Israel and even hates Arabs because her hatred of Israel will get Arabs killed. I couldn’t follow the argument because of that arrant nonsense thing.

CNN: “Watch the full Second Presidential Debate Hosted by ABC”

Afghanistan was the other country in the greater Middle East that came up.

Harris expressed her agreement with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan, noting that four presidents had sought to withdraw, but he was the first to do so, saving the $300 million a day that the fruitless war was costing taxpayers. She said that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Harris blamed the debacle of the withdrawal on the “weak deal” negotiated directly with the Taliban by Don Trump, which she implied rather detracted from his reputation as a deal-maker. She said he by-passed the Afghan government and as part of his deal he released 5,000 Taliban terrorists. She expressed outrage that he would invite the Taliban to Camp David.

Harris is correct about the cost of the Afghanistan War, which came to $2.313 trillion over 21 years. That is $110 billion a year. Divided by 365, it comes to $301 million per day. Although al-Qaeda plotted the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, it is not clear that they told the Taliban what they were planning, and it was kind of odd that Afghanistan, rather than the al-Qaeda network, should have been thought the danger to the U.S.

I’d say her account was accurate regarding the favorability of the deal Trump proposed to the Taliban. It is also true that Trump really wanted out of Afghanistan and kept telling his generals to get out, and they slow-rolled him. In some ways the story shows that on this issue Biden and Trump agreed. It isn’t for sure that Biden could have gotten a better deal than Trump on withdrawal. As for leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations, that was weird. But given the way it collapsed and its top leaders were implicated in large-scale theft, it is not obvious that if Trump had included them in the talks, they could have obtained more favorable terms.

I don’t agree with her allegation that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” I think the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria are in a war zone and that they are actively still fighting al-Qaeda, but also Shiite militias. Although the 2,500 US troops in Iraq are now classified as trainers, they do appear to be providing back up to the Iraqi Army in mopping up operations against ISIL in northern Iraq.

But the statement is also a little misleading because so many U.S. military interventions are aerial. The U.S. has been bombing Yemen regularly because the Houthis have been targeting container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea in support of the people of Gaza. You can’t just make this mini-war disappear because there are no boots on the ground. The US routinely bombs the al-Shabab extremist fundamentalist movement in Somalia.

In fact, in the past year the US has also bombed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria in reprisal for their attacks on bases housing US troops in those two countries. The Shiite militias struck at the US in Iraq, Syria and Jordan in an effort to punish it for its heavy support to the Israeli total war on Gaza. When you are actively bombing Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq you can’t be said to be entirely at peace.

“Prize Fight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Trump boasted that in the 18 months after his deal with the Taliban, no US troops were killed in Afghanistan. This is true, but it is because he promised to get out of Afghanistan shortly if the Taliban ceased the attacks.

Trump said that the leader of the Taliban is “Abdul.” He was probably referring to the Taliban political chief in 2020, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul is not a name on its own. It means “servant of” and is followed by a name of God. Abdul-Ghani means “servant of the All-Sufficient” (that is, God does not need anything because his essence is intrinsically rich). Baradar signed the deal for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 2020.

Biden essentially followed the Trump treaty, though he delayed the promised US withdrawal from April 2021 to August. Although Trump is correct that the withdrawal was done chaotically, he was the one who guaranteed that it would be by his pledge to completely withdraw by a date certain. Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is ridiculous.

( RFE/RL ) – The Taliban has attempted to police the public appearances and behavior of millions of Afghans, especially women, since seizing power in 2021.

But the enforcement of the extremist group’s rules governing morality, including its strict Islamic dress code and gender segregation in society, was sporadic and uneven across the country.

Now, the hard-line Islamist group has formally codified into law its long set of draconian restrictions, triggering fear among Afghans of stricter enforcement.

The Law On the Propagation Of Virtue And Prevention Of Vice, which was officially enacted and published on August 21, imposes severe restrictions on the appearances, behavior, and movement of women. The law also enforces constraints on men.

Adela, a middle-aged woman, is the sole breadwinner for her family of 10. She is concerned that the new morality law will erode the few rights that women still have.

The Taliban has allowed some women, primarily in the health and education sectors, to work outside their homes.

“I fear that Afghan women will no longer be able to go to their jobs,” Adela, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Dilawar, a resident of the capital, Kabul, warned of a public backlash if the Taliban intensified the enforcement of its widely detested restrictions.

“The youth are suffering from extreme unemployment. Oppressing them…will provoke reactions,” the 26-year-old, whose name was also changed due to security concerns, told Radio Azadi.

Long List Of Restrictions

The new morality law consists of 35 articles, many of which target women.

Women are required to fully cover their faces and bodies when in public and are banned from wearing “transparent, tight, or short” clothing. The law also bans women from raising their voices or singing in public.

Women must also be accompanied by a male chaperone when they leave their homes and cannot use public transport without a male companion.

The law forbids unrelated adult men and women from looking at each other in public.

Men must also dress modestly, even when playing sports or exercising. They are prohibited from shaving or trimming their beards. Men are also compelled to attend prayers as well as fast during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan.

“[Men] should not get haircuts, which violate Islamic Shari’a law,” says one of the articles in the law. “Friendship and helping [non-Muslim] infidels and mimicking their appearance” is prohibited.

Afghans are forbidden from “using or promoting” crossses, neckties, and other symbols deemed to be Western.

Premarital sex and homosexuality are outlawed. Drinking alcohol, the use of illicit drugs, and gambling are considered serious crimes.

Playing or listening to music in public is banned. Meanwhile, the celebration of non-Muslim holidays, including Norouz, the Persian New Year, are also prohibited.

The Taliban’s dreaded morality police are responsible for enforcing the morality law. The force, believed to number several thousand, is overseen by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

Under the new law, the powers of the morality police have been expanded.

Members of the force will be deployed across the country to monitor compliance, according to the law. Members of the morality police are instructed to issue warnings to offenders. Repeat offenders can be detained, fined, and even have their property confiscated.

The morality police can detain offenders for up to three days and hand out punishments “deemed appropriate” without a trial.

The Taliban revealed last week that the force detained more than 13,000 Afghans during the past year for violating the extremist group’s morality rules.

‘Hellish Conditions’

The Taliban’s morality law has been widely condemned by Afghans, Western countries, and human rights organizations.

The Taliban has defended the law, which it claims is “firmly rooted in Islamic teachings.”

“This new law is deeply harmful,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “It represents a hardening and institutionalization of these rules by giving them the status of law.”

She said the law is a “serious escalation” and “swift slide to ever more hellish conditions for Afghan women and girls.”

Roza Otunbaeva, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, on August 25 called the law a “distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future” because of the broad powers the Taliban’s morality police will have “to threaten and detain anyone based on broad and sometimes vague lists of infractions.”

Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer of politics at the American University of Afghanistan, said that parts of the morality law are “extremely vague.”

Yet, the morality police are given broad powers, including to “arbitrarily” punish people without due process, he said.

“[This is] making them the judge, jury, and executioner,” said Baheer.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

“Women banned from speaking in public by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers” | BBC News