The Taliban will Escape Pariah Status by Posing as the Enemy of ISIS

Patrick Cockburn

The slaughter of at least 79 Afghan civilians and 13 American servicemen at Kabul airport has propelled the Afghan offshoot of Isis to the top of the news agenda, as it was intended to do. The movement showed with one ferocious assault, at a time and place guaranteeing maximum publicity, that it intends to be a player in Afghanistan under the new Taliban rulers.

President Joe Biden, echoing President George W Bush after 9/11, said: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

But the self-destructive US response to 9/11 should serve as a warning about the perils of ill-directed over-reaction. Reducing complex developments in Afghanistan to another episode in “the war on terror” is misleading, counter-productive and one of the root causes of the present mess.

By viewing everything in Afghanistan through the prism of “counter-terrorism” 20 years ago, the US plugged itself into a civil war that it exacerbated and from which it has just emerged on the losing side.

Biden is now the target of a storm of criticism from all quarters for an over-hasty US exit, but Donald Trump had planned an even swifter pull-out. Moreover, he was the architect of the one-sided withdrawal agreement with the Taliban signed in February 2020, which persuaded Afghans that the Americans had switched sides and they had better do the same if they were going to survive.

Biden has been wounded politically by the present debacle, but the damage may not be lasting, as television pictures of the carnage at Kabul airport fade in the public mind – and he stresses that he has extracted the US from an unwinnable war. Who now remembers that, as recently as 2019, Trump betrayed America’s Kurdish allies who had defeated Isis in Syria by green-lighting a Turkish invasion of their territory that turned many of them into refugees?

There may even be advantages for America that world attention is wholly focused on events at Kabul airport, involving as they do some tens of thousands of people, and diverting attention away from the grim prospects facing 18 million Afghan women and the likely persecution of 4 million Shia Muslims. Another benefit for the US is the rebranding of the Taliban as the enemies of Isis, which replaces them as chief bogeymen for the US and makes defeat by the Taliban more palatable

The same thought has clearly occurred to the Taliban, which has been fighting Islamic State Khorasan, the regional franchise of Isis, since 2015. “Our guards are also risking their lives at Kabul airport, they face a threat too from the Islamic State group,” said an anonymous Taliban official before the bombing. By one account, 28 Taliban fighters were killed by the blast. Rebranded as an anti-Isis force, the Taliban will find it much easier to win legitimacy, international recognition and acquire desperately needed economic aid.

Isis itself has denounced the Taliban as collaborators with the US, saying that only an understanding between the two can explain the speed of the Taliban advance and of the Kabul government’s collapse. Here they are at one with some of the defeated leaders on the government side. The fall of Kabul was the “result of a large, organised and cowardly conspiracy,” claimed Atta Mohammad Noor, a former warlord, following his precipitous escape by helicopter.

Isis leaders do not like the fact the Taliban has succeeded in gaining control of an entire state, in contrast to the so-called caliphate they attempted to establish in western Iraq and eastern Syria in 2014, which was eradicated along with its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in 2019.

Islamic State Khorasan is not a large organisation and has between 1,500 and 2,200 fighters, according to a recent UN report. The airport bombings are not even its most horrific acts of butchery in Kabul this year – that goes to the murder of 85 Shia Hazara schoolgirls by a car bomb in May.

Isis feeds off the denunciations that follow such mass murders, be they in Kabul, Paris or Manchester, which serve to raise its profile, attracting new recruits and money. But how far does Isis really pose a physical threat inside and outside Afghanistan? Will the country once again become a haven for al-Qaeda-type groups, as it was when Osama bin Laden was based there before 2001?

The situation today differs from 20 years ago. Then, the Taliban needed an alliance with al-Qaeda, which provided it with money and fanatical fighters, such as the two suicide bombers who assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the very able leader of the anti-Taliban forces in 2001. Today, the Taliban needs no such assistance and, on the contrary, will present itself as an enthusiastic new recruit to “the war on terror” whose other failings should be ignored. This is a well-worn path for authoritarian states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia whose abuses are routinely ignored or downplayed in the west.

In the wake of the airport bombing, the Taliban is well on the way to escaping isolation as a pariah state, which it experienced between 1996 and 2001.

Self-interest could propel the Taliban to fight against Isis in order to establish links with the west, but the relationship between the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Isis is more complicated than that dictated by such realpolitik. Taliban leaders previously living in comfort abroad in Pakistan and Qatar may see the advantage of showing a moderate face to the world.

But Taliban military commanders and their fighters, having won a spectacular victory against those whom they regard as heretics and traitors, will not be eager to dilute their beliefs, and instead will pursue those whom the US and its allies identify as terrorists. Many in Islamic State Khorasan are former Taliban fighters and all the fundamentalist jihadi groups share, broadly speaking, a common ideology and view of the world.

Clearly these movements fight, envy and collaborate with each other, with most welcoming the Taliban victory and a few denouncing it as the outcome a US-Taliban deal – as indeed it is. But looked at in more global terms, the overthrow of the US-backed Afghan government with at least 100,000 well-armed soldiers by the smaller less well-equipped Taliban will be taken as a sign of the strength of fundamentalist Islamist jihadi religious movements. As with the capture of Mosul in Iraq in 2014 by 800 Isis fighters pitted against three Iraqi divisions, such victories will appear to sympathisers to be divinely inspired.

The swift collapse of the Kabul government demonstrates that western-backed or installed regimes seldom achieve legitimacy or the ability to stand alone. In the case of Afghanistan, the disintegration was part psychological – the government simply could not believe that their superpower ally was going to desert them.

The debacle was also military, the Pentagon having created an Afghan army which was a mirror image of America’s and therefore could not fight without being able to call in airstrikes at will. These deep-seated failures are more important than the Isis suicide bombing at Kabul airport.

Afghanistan Crisis Must End America’s Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty

Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies

Millions of Afghans have been displaced by the war. Photo: MikrofonNews

Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.

Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.

Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.

To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.

The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.

Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.

So what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid.

But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S. installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.

Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that ”it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.”

Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.

A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability.

The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.

Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.

Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government’s control. As TI reported, “The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fueling grievances against the Afghan government and channeling material support to the insurgency.”

The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.

Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018  Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.

Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.

Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.

In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.

After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of covid-19.

The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.

Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries – America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.

If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.

The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.

COVID-19 cases soar in Scotland as schools reopen

Margot Miller

Since the Scottish parliament lifted all Covid restrictions on August 9 and schools reopened on August 16 after the summer break, coronavirus cases are soaring.

On Friday, cases hit a record high of 6,835, a rise from 1,567 or over 300 percent since the beginning of the autumn term. In comparison, daily cases reached a high of 4,234 during the summer wave. This was the third record set for daily cases in a matter of days. On Sunday the record was surpassed again—for the fourth time in six days—as Scotland reported another 7,113 cases.

Half of all new cases are in the under 25 age group, and on Tuesday 34 percent of cases were under 19 years old. Public Health Scotland (PHS) reported a threefold rise in case rates for 16-17-year-olds since August 8, and a fivefold rise for 18-19-year-olds—compared to the national average which doubled. Test positivity rates for children aged 2-17 are at 19.9 percent.

On August 24, 15,000 pupils (14,914) were absent from school due to Covid, with nearly 18 percent (2,496) sick with the virus and 11,976 in self-isolation. Over 1,500 Scottish education staff were also absent due to Covid-19 related reasons. Of these, 266 teachers and 215 school-based staff either had a positive Covid test or symptoms. Two out of every 100 pupils were reported absent from school for Covid-related reasons on August 27 by PHS.

Even before further and higher education campuses reopen in September, educational settings account for one out of six cases overall.

On Monday, 551 people were in hospital and 52 in intensive care, up from 312 people in hospital on August 20 and just 58 on May 4. To August 21, there have been 943 child Covid hospital admissions in Scotland during the pandemic. The total Covid death toll in the country stands at 8,103.

The situation had worsened so much that by last Thursday that the World Health Organisation named five health boards in Scotland—Dumfries and Galloway, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, and Tayside—in its list of the 20 most severely affected areas in Europe.

In response to this growing catastrophe, Deputy First Minister John Swinney admitted, “Undoubtedly the gathering of people together in schools will have fueled that [the case rise] to some extent, and you can see that in the proportion of younger people who are testing positive.”

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said, “That is one of the sharpest rises we have experienced at any point during the pandemic,” describing the numbers as “cause for concern” but making clear the government was not considering even a circuit breaker lockdown. On Sunday, Sturgeon herself was forced into self-isolation after coming into contact with someone with Covid.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)

Many young people remain unvaccinated. A total of 74 percent of 18-24-year-olds have had at least one dose, of whom only 46 percent are double vaccinated. This compares with 95 percent of over 40s who are fully vaccinated. The figure is 70 percent for those in the 30-39 age range. Only now will 16-17-year-olds be offered a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

School children are currently not eligible for vaccination and therefore among the most vulnerable, yet they have been sent unprotected back into the classroom! Schools are a major vector for the spread of the virus and children can suffer devastating health consequences from Covid—including cognitive, respiratory and cardiac damage, Long Covid and, in the most tragic cases, death.

The UK’s Office for National Statistics April report estimated that of children who tested positive, 12.9 percent aged two to 11, and 14.5 percent aged 12 to 16 had symptoms five weeks after they were first infected. In the UK in July, 33,000 children ages 2–16 and 71,000 young people ages 17–24 were suffering Covid symptoms after 12 weeks.

Many schools in Scotland have already been forced to send pupils or classes home.

· Around 60 out of the 203 schools in the Highlands were affected by delta outbreaks. Grantown, Kingussie, Culloden and Fort William's Lochaber high schools all have a number of year groups self-isolating. Aviemore Primary and Thurso's Pennyland were partially closed.

· Between schools reopening on August 16 and August 22, NHS Highland reported more than 1,000 new cases.

· Classes were suspended at Crossmichael Primary in the south of Scotland due to eight members of staff self-isolating for four days.

· In Glasgow, a class from St Albert’s Primary school was sent home for 14 days following an outbreak. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde announced it was carrying out contact tracing at seven schools.

· At least two high schools in Aberdeen reported Covid cases among senior pupils.

The example of Scotland is an urgent warning of how quickly the virus spreads when restrictions on social distancing are lifted and schools reopen.

The response of the education unions in Scotland to this next deadly stage of the pandemic mirrors that of the unions in the rest of the UK—cowardly capitulation to the Johnson government’s policy of “social murder”.

The unions play a particularly pernicious role in maintaining the fiction that schools can be made safe with minimal mitigation methods and vaccines alone. In fact, the explosion of cases as soon as restrictions are relaxed shows the claimed mitigation strategy is little more than window dressing for a policy of mass infection.

While vaccines currently significantly reduce the chances of hospitalization, they offer only limited protection against catching and spreading the virus, and this protection declines over time, allowing the virus to continue circulating. While the virus is allowed to continue infecting large numbers of people, it is given the opportunity to develop new, more virulent, vaccine evading strains and variants.

Larry Flanagan, the general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland teaching union, commented, “These figures will be a cause for concern for school communities… They underline the need to remain on guard to ensure schools remain COVID conscious and that mitigations are maintained.”

Supporting the relaxation of government guidelines on the required response when an outbreak occurs, his only complaint was that “the change in contact tracing arrangements for schools is creating confusion for parents, pupils and staff. We wish to see all pupils identified as close contacts being required to get a clear PCR test before returning to class.

“This removes the 10-day self-isolation requirement but offers a quick reassurance to school communities and will reduce the risk of in-school transmission.”

Schools in Scotland will follow revised-down “safety” measures for another six weeks at most, before scrapping them entirely: one-metre social distancing; only children determined high-risk to isolate for 10 days after close contact with a positive case; mask wearing for secondary pupils in lessons; secondary school staff and pupils to take twice weekly lateral flow tests. SNP Education Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said the measures will be dropped earlier if possible.

Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association general secretary Seamus Searson said, “To keep everybody safe we need to make sure that everybody is vaccinated. Ireland are already vaccinating the 12 to 15-year-olds… we need to move on that quickly to keep everybody safe.” He called on for the mitigation measures to last beyond six weeks.

No union is advocating action to bring the disastrous spread of infection among children, school workers and the wider community to an end. They are refusing to wage a fight under conditions in which growing numbers of parents are deregistering their children rather than send them into unsafe schools. Last Friday, PHS figures revealed that 399 pupils were not in school last week because their parents “chose to keep them away… contrary to public health guidance”.

Teachers denounce homicidal school reopenings across Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

August, which kicked off the second school semester of 2021, has witnessed the largest reopening of schools in Brazil since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nine states, where until this month schools had remained closed, decreed the return of in-person teaching. And in states where classrooms had already been opened, protocols have been reformulated to allow an even greater influx of students to the classrooms.

The full reopening of schools is the centerpiece of the Brazilian ruling class’s campaign to “promote a return to economic activities” and a new status quo based on the mantra that it is necessary to “live with the pandemic,” as stated by Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga.

The adoption of this reckless policy by rulers all over the country has caused the “resumption of the circulation of people in the streets in a pattern close to the one prior to the pandemic,” declared the August 26 bulletin of the Fiocruz’s COVID-19 Observatory. The Fiocruz researchers emphasized, however, that “the positivity rate of the tests remains high, which shows the intense circulation of the virus, with the expansion of the Delta variant” and warned that the “relaxation of preventive measures by people and managers contributes to the high spread of the virus.”

Keeping schools open under such circumstances represents a barbaric experiment with human lives, particularly those of children. While capitalist managers spread the lie that young people don’t get infected or sick from COVID-19, the explosion of the Delta variant is leading to an unprecedented crowding of children’s ICUs in countries such as the United States.

Return to school in Itapevi, a municipality on the western edge of Greater São Paulo.(Credit: Felipe Barros | ExLibris | PMI)

Even before being hit by this virulent strain, Brazil already recorded catastrophic levels of COVID-19 deaths among children and teenagers. Official data, acknowledged as a significant underestimate, has recorded more than 1,200 deaths of people under 18 in 2020, 45 percent of whom were under the age of 2. A Uol survey revealed that 1,581 young people between the ages of 10 and 19 died from COVID-19 in the first six months of this year alone—an average of 263 deaths in this age group per month.

Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is now the epicenter of the spread of the Delta variant in Brazil. Delta has already become the dominant variant in the state, accounting for more than 60 percent of the samples collected. Simultaneously with the spread of the new variant, Rio has registered an increase in infections and deaths among the elderly and an explosion in hospitalizations, which has led to 96 percent occupation of ICU beds in the capital.

The terrifying evolution of the virus in Rio de Janeiro contrasts with the policies adopted by state and local governments. The mayor of the capital, Eduardo Paes of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), had set September 2 as the date for initiating a series of measures to fully resume economic activities in the city, which included mega events and the end of mask mandates. Although Paes announced the postponement of these measures in view of the rise of Delta cases, Rio’s City Hall kept municipal schools fully operating.

Educators from dozens of schools in the Rio de Janeiro municipal network have revealed that their units are being kept open even in cases of coronavirus outbreaks. The Sepe teachers union reported having received, as of August 26, reports of 94 schools functioning with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 infections. These numbers have grown exponentially over the last two weeks: on August 23 there were 76 schools operating under these conditions; on August 19, 49; and on August 17, 31. In addition, there are 53 municipal schools completely closed, and 47 with classes suspended due to infections.

São Paulo

The current conditions in Rio de Janeiro underscore the catastrophic prospects for the pandemic’s development in the coming weeks and months in Brazil. This is especially true for São Paulo, which has already seen the prevalence of the Delta variant rise to 43 percent of analyzed samples.

A projection of the evolution of the Delta variant produced by the Info Track, a platform developed by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) and the São Paulo State University (UNESP), concluded that São Paulo will have an “explosion [of cases] from the second week of September.”

The São Paulo state government is, however, promoting the largest “flexibilization” of social distancing measures since the beginning of the pandemic. Opposing this criminal policy, UNESP professor Wallace Casaca told G1: “Delta is a very aggressive strain. We see the outbreaks with great concern. We have to accelerate now as much as possible the vaccination with the second shots, but the vaccine alone is not a solution for everything.”

Governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) responded to these warnings by reaffirming his complete indifference to science and the preservation of human lives. On August 18, he dissolved his COVID-19 Contingency Center and responded to criticism from the São Paulo Infectious Diseases Society by declaring that his sociopathic measures were being taken “in due time.”

Despite reported outbreaks in more than 1,200 schools and the deaths of more than 100 educators and students in the state public school network alone, the government of São Paulo is keeping the schools open and has expanded their capacity, reducing the distance between students within the classrooms.

The capital of São Paulo has the largest school system in Brazil, with more than 2 million students enrolled, and its in-person operation has potentially devastating consequences. A teacher in the city’s municipal public network told the World Socialist Web Site that educators have been reporting an increasing number of outbreaks in schools. He declared:

“Last week, cases started appearing among staff at my school, so far there are three confirmed. Although the protocol for school reopening says that two cases already constitute an outbreak, so far my school has not been closed.

“We have news of other schools that had outbreaks and remain open. A teacher wrote on Facebook that in a single week 14 staff members and one student were sent home due to COVID infections. Not only does the school remain operating, but students from different classes were brought together due to the lack of teachers.

“A few months ago, a case like that would have made newspaper headlines. But today the situation is being covered up, both by the government and by the union. Me and my colleagues have even called the SINPEEM [teachers union] to ask about their orientation regarding the outbreak in the school, and they didn’t have any. They only repeated the government’s official position.

“This is very revolting because the union broke our strike and sent us back to in-person work with a bunch of promises that protocols would be reviewed to increase safety and celebrating the vaccination of teachers as the big solution to our problems. Now we are working endless overtime hours to ‘pay’ for the strike days, being even more exposed to the virus, and people are getting infected regardless of whether they are vaccinated.”

Bahia

The universal character of the homicidal policies promoted by the Brazilian ruling class is highlighted by the fact that it is being equally adopted in the states governed by the so-called “left-wing” opposition to the extreme-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro.

The government of Rui Costa, of the Workers Party (PT), in Bahia recently clashed with a movement of educators opposing the reopening of state schools. Costa has publicly threatened striking workers with dismissal and has effectively cut their pay to force them into classrooms.

Last Friday, the APLB teachers’ union—which is also presided over by the PT—announced a deal reached with the government behind the workers’ backs that agreed to the return of in-person classes on September 1. The rotten agreement, which was celebrated by the union officials as a “victory,” imposes face-to-face classes even on Saturdays to compensate for the days on strike.

The APLB union’s maneuver against teachers of Bahia followed exactly the same script as the union’s betrayal of teachers in São Paulo and was received with the same outrage by the workers. On social networks, rank-and-file teachers posted hundreds of comments denouncing the union’s coup and demanding truly safe conditions for the reopening of schools.

One teacher wrote: “Union leadership and government united as always. Students without immunization, some schools with suspended classes due to COVID-19, the Delta variant still feared, scientists recommending a third dose of the vaccine, and the union leadership accepted in-person classes for September 1.”

Another teacher stated: “I didn’t see any victory there. They didn’t listen to or even consult the workers regarding the return, the possibility of a return was not even mentioned. And if it was going to return on September 1, why were there salary cuts? For me this was a defeat. The victory was to Rui Costa and Luiz Caetano [the government’s Institutional Relations secretary], they were victorious.”

A third teacher declared: “What was the ‘victory’? Unless they are referring to the government’s victory, because the students will return without vaccines and without even testing. The COVID-19 infections in the state schools are there. That’s helping to normalize an abnormal situation.”

***

All over Brazil, similar situations are being faced by educators, parents and students, and are provoking a sharp growth of social opposition.

In Amazonas, in northern Brazil, where the most catastrophic experiments with the herd immunity policy have been conducted, teachers are denouncing the extraordinarily unsafe conditions in their classrooms, while parents are protesting the government’s forcing their children back to in-person classes.

At the opposite end of the country, in Rio Grande do Sul, educators are reporting growing outbreaks in schools, which has been acknowledged by the health secretariat in the capital, Porto Alegre, where the number of individuals exposed to outbreaks in schools jumped from 3,125 on July 1 to 3,999 on August 25.

These movements across the country express the rise of a renewed wave of class struggle among Brazilian educators. The development of this struggle requires that fundamental conclusions be drawn from the crucial political experiences of the last year and a half marked by the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On every occasion that teachers attempted to mount an opposition to the ruthless policies of the bourgeois governments, they have faced the efforts of the unions to sabotage their struggles. At this extremely critical moment of the pandemic, no resistance is being organized by the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE) and its affiliated unions. On the contrary, teachers can be sure that union officials are discussing, among themselves and with state representatives, the best strategies for suppressing workers’ struggles against the pandemic.

Delta variant behind sharp spike in Pacific COVID-19 cases

John Braddock

The World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement on August 26 stressing the importance of “continued vigilance,” as the Delta COVID-19 variant continues to have “dramatic impacts” in parts of the Pacific and Asia.

WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, Takeshi Kasai, said it was up to everyone to “stay the course.” By continuing to make the best decisions “based on our experience, shared learning and reliable data,” he emphasised, it is “within our power to reduce the threat of the virus.”

The WHO noted that 10 Pacific states have not had any cases of COVID-19 to date. They are some of the most remote: American Samoa, Niue, the Cook Islands, Pitcairn Island, Kiribati, Tokelau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Tonga, Nauru and Tuvalu. Another five have had no cases in the past 100 days: Wallis and Futuna; Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, and the Marshall Islands.

A nurse stands outside Tamara Twomey hospital in Suva, Fiji. (AP Photo/Aileen Torres-Bennett)

However, three Pacific countries where the Delta variant has gained a foothold–Fiji, French Polynesia and Papua New Guinea—have all experienced a sharp spike in cases and deaths as the virus spreads out of control.

In Fiji, infections recently spread beyond the capital Suva and the main island Viti Levu, to more remote villages and towns, including the west-coast holiday island of Malolo, which has 29 active cases. There has also been one death reported on Naviti Island in the Yasawa group. Health Secretary James Fong said new cases, revealed last week, showed the virus had reached “all the major divisions of the country.”

There were 184 new cases reported on August 30, including 10 deaths from August 26-30, taking the toll to 489. Of the latest cases, 133 were reported from the Western Division, 40 from the Central Division and 11 from Kadavu in the East. The Northern town of Labasa also has three cases.

Fiji now has 19,463 active cases, with 46,141 recorded since the outbreak began in April. Recent deaths include 10 young people, with the latest victims a six-month-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, reported last weekend. Official numbers however fail to show the true extent of cases, as the Health Ministry has admitted its reporting systems are overloaded. In many areas, no testing is taking place.

Former health minister Neil Sharma told Radio NZ the virus has been “moving faster” than the provision of vaccines. The outer-islands of Rotuma, Yasawa and Lakeba only received their first vaccines on July 27. Fiji’s second island, Vanua Levu, now has restricted movement in place for 14 days. Sharma said the island’s population of 200,000 will be badly impacted, as it had “very limited” health facilities, with only two small hospitals and a predominantly ageing population.

Responsibility for the disastrous spread of the virus rests directly with the government of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama. Since the beginning of the outbreak in April, Bainimarama has bluntly resisted calls for a national lockdown, saying it would “destroy” the economy.

New Zealand epidemiologist Michael Baker told Radio NZ, as early as June 16, that the situation in Fiji was “extremely worrying” and an urgent national lockdown had to be “seriously considered.” It would be “devastating,” he predicted, if the virus were to spread from Viti Levu, due to the paucity of healthcare in the outer areas. Baker urged the Fiji government to act “very decisively” to return to an “elimination position.” Such warnings have been ignored.

In line with the drive by governments internationally to begin “living with” the virus, the country’s chief medical advisor Jemesa Tudravu said on the weekend the virus would become an endemic disease “similar to the flu virus.” “We are not going back to a COVID-contained or COVID-free country,” he declared.

Bainimarama has announced an easing of restrictions beginning this week. In his first national address on the pandemic in several weeks, Bainimarama claimed: “As more of Fiji becomes fully vaccinated, we will forge a powerful shield of protection against severe disease and death from COVID-19, and much of what we miss most about our lives can be restored.”

Bainimarama said curfew would start an hour later, at 8pm, once the fully vaccinated target population is 50 percent, at 9pm when it reaches 60 percent, 10pm at the 70 percent threshold, and back to 11pm once 80 percent is reached. Containment area borders on Viti Levu will be lifted, once a 60 percent target is reached.

So far, 95 percent of the target population of 587,651 has received the first dose of vaccine, while 45 percent are fully vaccinated. The “target” population, which prioritises front line workers, police, health care workers, hospitality workers and the elderly, is well short of the country’s total population of 890,000.

The dire consequences of “opening up” have been exposed in French Polynesia, which opened its borders in July 2020 for quarantine-free travel, to boost tourism. President Edouard Fritch acknowledged at the time the “probability” that there would be more COVID-19 cases, but declared that if French Polynesia didn’t reopen, the economic consequences would be “catastrophic.”

The Delta variant has now quickly spread to 45 islands, including Tahiti. Daily new case numbers have hit more than 1,000, reaching a total of over 40,000. The pandemic has claimed 385 lives, with 412 COVID-19 patients in hospital, and 55 in intensive care. With hospitals at capacity, there are calls for field hospitals to be set up. The main hospital in Papeete has appealed for additional medical personnel to be brought in from France.

Meanwhile less than half of the population of about 280,000 has had their first vaccination. The government recently published a detailed list of which people must be inoculated within two months. They include medical staff, people in contact with the public, such as teachers, and those deemed to be vulnerable. Anyone refusing to comply faces a fine of $US1.700 and possible suspension from work.

Most of the territory has now entered a two-week lockdown. The French government in Paris said it would get the National Assembly to extend the state of health emergency in French Polynesia, until the middle of November.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Pacific’s largest country, with a population of nearly nine million, already meagre testing for COVID-19 has recently been scaled back, as the confirmed case numbers and deaths approach 18,000 and 200 respectively. Six staff at PNG’s national pandemic control centre, all of whom were unvaccinated, last week tested positive for the virus.

Some authorities are downplaying the threat from the virus. Chief of Medical Emergency Services Sam Yockapua, claimed the rate of transmission and hospital admission had gone down significantly in recent months, and there was a risk of “focussing too much” on COVID-19. He said PNG had not been able to enforce lockdowns like New Zealand or Australia, and had to “live with” the disease.

Glen Mola, head of obstetrics and gynaecology at Port Moresby General Hospital, however, told Radio NZ that authorities had little handle on how many people have COVID-19. The town of Goroka had done around 2,800 COVID tests since January. “Only 2,800 tests in the whole of the five million people in the Highlands, and 468 of them were positive; that’s about 18 percent. But we have no idea who that 18 percent are,” he said.

According to WHO figures, PNG has administered 143,192 doses of vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that is enough to have vaccinated only about 0.6 percent of the country’s population.

COVID-19 hospitalizations top 100,000 daily average in US

Patrick Martin

Average daily hospitalizations in the United States due to COVID-19 have topped the 100,000 mark for the first time since last winter, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has reported. Hospitalizations are up 500 percent over the past two months.

Medical staff tend to a patient with coronavirus, on a COVID-19 ward inside the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The statistic is an ominous milestone of an impending surge in deaths, which have already passed the mark of 1,000 per day for the first time since March. In portions of Florida and Oregon, as well as other states, portable morgues have been ordered to handle the current or anticipated demand.

The rise in hospitalizations is concentrated in the Southern states. Florida leads in this dismal category, with an average of 16,467 COVID-19 cases so serious they require hospitalization, with Texas following with 14,352. The 11 states across the South, from Oklahoma to North Carolina and south to the Gulf Coast, account for 57,311 hospitalizations, more than half the US total.

But no region is spared. California ranks third with a daily average of 8,700 hospitalizations, and New York, Ohio and Illinois are in the top 15 states. Infections have risen sharply all across the country, although the more heavily vaccinated areas have seen a somewhat lesser increase in the number of hospitalizations.

Contrary to the official claims, from Biden on down, that children rarely become seriously ill from COVID-19, the total number of children currently hospitalized for coronavirus reached 1,500 Friday, according to federal figures, with the largest number in Texas, 317, followed by Florida with 215. Dozens have died.

According to figures reported by the New York Times Monday, one in five intensive care units in the United States has at least 95 percent of beds occupied. States like Alabama and Mississippi, with decrepit health care infrastructures in the best of times, have virtually no beds available. Parts of Texas and Florida are approaching those conditions.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a disaster declaration for Louisiana and Mississippi because of the combined impact of the pandemic and Hurricane Ida.

The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville asked last week for assistance from the National Guard to handle the crush of COVID-19 patients. Hospitals in many Southern states are running out of oxygen, which is indispensable to treating coronavirus. The cutoff of oxygen supplies would be an immediate death sentence to COVID-19 patients on ventilators.

More broadly, sometime this week the United States will become the first country in the world to have had 40 million cases of coronavirus. The US infection rate, nearly one in every eight people, is the highest for any major country. This comes despite the US having administered 370 million vaccine shots and fully vaccinated 174 million people, 52 percent of the population.

The soaring rate of infections and hospitalizations, together with deaths, mean that August 2021 has been a worse month for the pandemic in America than August 2020. This is a remarkable fact given that a year ago, vaccines had not yet been developed.

The emergence of the far more contagious Delta variant of coronavirus is a primary cause of the current upsurge in the pandemic. This variant, which first emerged in India, is a byproduct of the failure of capitalist governments all over the world to impose the necessary lockdowns and shutdowns required to save lives, halt the spread of the virus in its earliest stages, and thus deny it the time and the number of human hosts required for dangerous mutations to develop.

Another major difference between 2020 and 2021 is the reopening of most schools for in-person classes, and, in many states, the abandonment of masking either in schools or any other indoor setting. Social distancing has likewise been abandoned, in outdoor settings everywhere and in indoor settings in most areas.

Both factors, the emergence of Delta and the relaxation of public health measures, are the outcome of the deliberate refusal of the capitalist ruling elites all over the world to make saving lives and stopping the pandemic the number one priority. Instead, they have subordinated public health and human life to the preservation of “the economy,” by which they mean the preservation of capitalist profit-making and the greater enrichment of the financial aristocracy.

COVID-19 infections rising as children return to school in Germany

Tamino Dreisam

A fresh wave of infections and hospitalisations of children and adolescents is looming in Germany following the start of attendance classes at schools. Forty percent of the German population has not yet been fully vaccinated, and the trend in infection figures is soaring once again.

The seven-day average of infections has doubled in the last ten days alone. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), this increase is taking place “much earlier and faster than last year, when comparable incidence rates were first reached in October.” The institute reported last Wednesday of around 16,700 new infections and a rate of infection indicating exponential growth at 1.19.

The explosion in the incidence of infection is mostly affecting younger age groups. Incidence rates were highest last week among school children (113), followed by the next highest age group of 15- to 34-year-olds (88). While the seven-day incidence is rising rapidly in all age groups, it has almost doubled in one week among the almost completely unvaccinated group of 5- to 14-year-olds.

Despite the triple-digit incidence among children, all state governments are set to move to full face-to-face learning after the summer holidays and systematically reintroduce compulsory attendance—a political crime backed by all of the political parties represented in the German parliament from the Left Party to the conservative Union parties.

A school in Germany (credit: www.instagram.com schuelerstreik_nrw)

Currently, only the city state of Hamburg has felt compelled to temporarily suspend compulsory attendance after the incidence rate among school children rose to 222.

There can be no doubt that the infection of children is deliberately accepted and intended. The situation is particularly acute in Schleswig-Holstein, where the incidence rate among schoolchildren rose to 166 last week and is also driving up infection figures in other age groups.

Dr Anne Marcic, infection control officer at the state health ministry, told Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) that in the state it is “no longer a problem when young children become infected,” rather, it is “their only opportunity to immunise themselves.” Preventing children from becoming infected is an “illusion,” the government adviser said: “They will come into contact with the pathogen.”

The weekly Die Zeit noted that “more than nine million children under twelve” who have not been vaccinated are now being deliberately “left to be contaminated by the virus.” Although they had “no choice” and “had to forego children’s birthdays, day-care festivities, many months of attendance classes and organised sports over the past year and a half,” these children are now being put at risk of contracting COVID-19 in the coming months.

The German Health Minister Jens Spahn, Bavaria’s Premier Markus Söder and other government politicians had earlier declared that “everyone who is not vaccinated” would be infected with the coronavirus in winter. These politicians neglected to outline the considerable suffering such infection of children and others means for working families.

In reality, this murderous contagion policy is endangering the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of children and their families. This is shown by figures from the US, where infections are massively increasing after schools reopened. In the third week of August alone, 180,000 children became infected. In the same period, 24 children died of COVID-19. In the total population, the daily number of infections has risen above 170,000. Last Wednesday, almost 1,300 people died as a result of the pandemic.

The deadly dangers of acute coronavirus infection are compounded by the risk of late and long-term symptoms, including multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and Long Covid. An infection can lead to a loss of up to 7 IQ points, inflicting more cognitive damage than a stroke. A survey from the UK found that 9 to 13 percent of children and young people infected with COVID-19 still had at least one symptom five weeks after infection.

The RKI, which relies on reports from local health authorities, concludes that the number of COVID-19 outbreaks in schools “may have recently begun to show a renewed increase (despite school holidays in most German states).” The original incidence rate benchmark of 35 for alternate education and 50 for remote learning have long been jettisoned by the country’s federal and state governments.

The danger in classrooms is further increased because one and a half years after the start of the pandemic, only a small minority of classrooms are equipped with protective measures such as air filters. The government’s announced funding programme of 200 million euros amounts to just one-fifth of the minimum sum that experts say would be needed to install air filters in all schools. It corresponds to less than 0.4 percent of the Bundeswehr’s (Germany army) annual budget.

Moreover, several federal states have adopted rules to keep schools open as long as possible. Berlin, governed by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Left Party and the Greens, has an incidence rate of nearly 75 and has introduced a three-tier plan, which envisages that attendance will continue to take place for selective grades even in the highest tier, i.e., highest level of infection. Assignment of the three levels is not dependent on incidence values, but rather on the decision of respective authorities.

In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (current incidence 125.9), face-to-face teaching will take place regardless of incidence levels. In Saxony, primary and special schools are to restrict their operations only at an incidence of 100. Schools in Thuringia are also subject to a tier system for which incidence figures are irrelevant. In the case of an infection at the school, only the infected person and all immediate contacts are to be sent into quarantine, but the school is to remain open.

For all other federal states, there are currently no rules as to when schools are to be closed, putting no limits on possible rates of infection.

In addition to keeping schools open, some federal states are abolishing basic protective measures, such as mandatory masks in class. In Bremen, Hesse, Saarland, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, masks are currently not compulsory in class. In Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony, the wearing of masks only applies when the incidence exceeds 35, in Bavaria at primary schools when the incidence exceeds 50 and at secondary schools when the incidence exceeds 25. In Berlin, masks are only compulsory for the first four weeks and then depend on incidence levels. In Hamburg, masks need not be worn for sports, music and theatre classes.

In Baden-Württemberg, where the Greens fill the posts of state premier and Minister of Education, the mask requirement is to be lifted two weeks after the start of the school year. The magazine familie.de reports that parents in Baden-Württemberg face a fine of up to 1,000 euros if they refuse to send their child to school.