India: Defence Budget in an Age of Scarcity

Bhartendu Kumar Singh


While defence budget allocation makes the news every year, this year the ubiquitous hypothesis in all strategic comments and opinion articles has been about ‘the marginal allocation being inimical to the India’s defence preparedness’. Critics, however, fail to understand that the defence budget is by and large a reasonably fair deal and probably the best in the current fiscal environment. 

Defence budget cuts have been quite common these days. As per available SIPRI estimates, global military expenditure decreased for the third consecutive year after peaking in 2011. The US defence budget has come down from US$691 billion in 2010 to US$585 in 2016. Russia has announced a cut of 5 per cent to its 2016 defence budget. In June 2015, Britain announced a 1.5 per cent cut in its defence budget. Even China, which ha- witnessed a consistent double-digit growth during the last two decades, had a modest single-digit growth this year. 

Though India has been performing well in the hitherto sluggish economic environment, its defence budget is subject to certain macro pulls and pressures. While the members of the Departmentally Related Standing Committee of the Parliament (DARC) have been recommending at least 3 per cent of the GDP in their several recommendations over the years, the 13th Finance Commission adopted a broader perspective of security and, therefore, recommended capping the defence budget at 1.76 per cent of the GDP so as to balance development along with defence. Successive budgets have worked hard to come to this benchmark. Given this tight fiscal situation where the budgetary resources are not going to come in liberal doles in future as well, there is no alternative but to explore ways and means beyond the defence budget. 

An immediate area for action is prudent expenditure management since revenue expenditure accounts for a major share of the armed forces, particularly in the Army that is manpower-intensive. While the Government notified the constitution of an Expenditure Management Commission in September 2014, defence expenditure was kept out of its purview despite the fact that defence accounts for more than 12 percent of Central Government expenditure. From a public policy perspective, vital penny need to be saved by scrutinising certain non-core services in the defence forces and see if they can be done by shifting them to civil side. The Accounts Branch of the Indian Air Force, for example, has 492 commissioned officers and 7,000 men catering to the pay matters of 1,60,000 officers and men in the Air Force. On a competitive note, the same can be provided by 300 people on the civilian side very easily. 

The Meteorology Branch of the Indian Air Force with 300 officers is equally unwieldy and needs pruning. Similarly, the rationale of putting a large section of Army officers in managing various functionalities in Army Service Corps needs reconsideration since many of these services can be provided by the market at a competitive cost without affecting defence preparedness. These are just representative examples that if properly explored, can go a long way in reducing the extra manpower and salary bill that is about to touch INR one lakh crore this year. The services must, as the honourable Defence Minister has rightly pointed out, do this as an in-house exercise and come out with a blue-print since India is the only country that has not been talking of manpower reduction while driving its military modernisation process.

Another area that deserves serious consideration is internal resource generation. China experimented with it rather successfully in the Eighties and Nineties when the budgetary allocations to the PLA remained stagnant for over a decade under the ‘four modernisations’ programme. Many countries including the US and UK are resorting to internal resource generation due to a frozen defence budget. India should not hesitate in exploring the vast potential in defence resource management. Defence land, for example, can be gainfully utilised wherever they can be leased out. The shopping complexes, marriage halls, clubs and banking facilities set up including ATMs are cash cows that need to be leveraged commercially. Presently, the revenue generated from these entities is going to the regimental funds of the services. The adoption of a roadmap for gradual conversion to accrual accounting by the Government makes it relatively easier for the defence forces to identify their assets and put them to commercial use wherever possible. 

In recent times, there has been a renewed emphasis on development and broadening the concept of security from mere military to human security. Inclusive growth has been the buzzword in the Indian development discourse as well and credit must go to the successive governments in giving a combined push to the defence and development agenda. The emphasis on the ‘make in India’ campaign should be seen in this light where the domestic military-industrial complex is being encouraged through a new defence production policy and FDI enhancement. The idea is to save the penny on foreign exchange since India imports 70 per cent of its weaponry. 

While more money is always welcome, critics of the defence budget need to empathise with the developmental priorities or the broader aspects of security. There is, therefore, no alternative to reducing the extra flab and generating internal resources for bridging the resource gap set up by the defence budget.

New Zealand Labour Party leader attacks Asian immigrants

John Braddock

New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party has responded to the deteriorating economic situation by stoking reactionary xenophobia and economic nationalism. On March 15, the Hutt News reported that during a visit to the working class centre of Lower Hutt, Labour leader Andrew Little blamed semi-skilled migrants from China and India for taking jobs from “those who are already living here.”

Little, a former national secretary of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union, said immigration was having a downwards impact on the country’s wages. “We’ve got a reasonably high level of inward migration and it’s not all at the skilled level. It wasn’t the intention of the immigration policy to do that,” Little declared.

Little singled out Asian workers, claiming there is an oversupply of Indian and Chinese chefs. “A lot of folks come here from overseas to get into the hospitality industry with those particular cooking skills and I think the question is: can we actually source those labour needs internally?” he asked. Labour would be justified in examining New Zealand’s immigration settings, Little asserted, “to make sure we’re getting the right mix and balance and that we’re not compromising the interests of those who are already living here trying to get decent pay and conditions.”

Little is making immigrants the scapegoat for the deepening social crisis for which successive Labour and National governments are responsible. The Labour governments of prime ministers David Lange (1984-1990) and Helen Clark (1999-2008), backed by the trade unions, bear prime responsibility for the extended assault on jobs, pay and living standards. Real hourly wages declined by up to 16 percent over the decade from 1984, and never recovered. Inequality soared. The labour share of income fell from 60 percent of income in the early 1980s to 46 percent in 2002 before recovering slightly—a loss in current dollar terms of about $19 billion per year, or $10,000 per wage earner per year.

Little’s call for a cap on immigration coincided with a renewed economic downturn. In January, international credit rating agency Fitch downgraded New Zealand’s outlook, saying it expected slower GDP growth due to falling dairy prices. The deepening slump in the industry is causing alarm in wider banking and financial circles, with one economist describing the situation as the worst in real terms since 1912. Thousands of job cuts are also underway, including the closure of Solid Energy coal mines and electronics retailer Dick Smith, and plans for up to 1,000 redundancies at the Inland Revenue Department.

Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing anti-immigrant NZ First Party, seized on Little’s comments to launch his own xenophobic anti-Asian diatribe. Peters told the New Zealand Herald on March 17 that Labour was “compromised by its past,” having previously “supported high levels of immigration” and ignored “the needs of ordinary New Zealand men and women in the workforce.”

Peters accused Auckland’s ethnic restaurants of being fronts for immigration fraud, charging “phenomenal sums” for job offers to bring people in from overseas. “People pay serious money to come in, all under the table, all wrong, all a total degradation of this country’s standards when it comes to workers, and all under our nose,” Peters fulminated.

Restaurant owners on Auckland’s Dominion Road, who Peters singled out, rejected his charges. Gary Holmes, representing the local Business Association, told the New Zealand Herald: “We know many of the business owners personally and they are all genuine, hard-working people.” Restrictions are already in place. Official immigration figures show visas granted to Chinese chefs are capped at 200 places—under a free trade agreement signed by Labour—and it took three years to fill these spots.

Responding to media criticism, Little told journalists that reporting of his statements was “baffling.” “I was asked about Labour’s policy on immigration generally. I said our approach was that as the economy slows there is a case to ‘turn the [immigration] tap down,’” he said. At the same time, he repeated his false claims that “large inflows of semi-skilled migrants” were putting pressure on jobs, especially in Auckland.

Various pro-Labour commentators defended Little. The trade union funded Daily Blog railed against the Herald for “bashing” Little over the issue in its March 19 editorial. Unite union leader Mike Treen declared that Labour had been “trapped into appearing as being opposed to migrant workers.” Chris Trotter told TV 3 that Little’s comments were a simple miscalculation. Labour is increasingly desperate to be seen in a “positive light,” Trotter said, and “if you push that immigration button, as we have seen in the United States with Donald Trump, you can get a reaction.”

Despite their posturing as “anti-racist,” none of the pseudo-left groups—the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), Fightback, and Socialist Aotearoa—condemned Little’s comments. In 2011 they all affiliated with the Maori nationalist Mana Party, which represents indigenous capitalists and is particularly hostile to foreigners, and falsely promoted its race-based identity politics as progressive. Claiming Labour can be pressured to the “left,” the pseudo-lefts advocate the return of a Labour-led government, with Mana as a partner.

Little’s positioning on immigration was no isolated incident or case of misguided populism. Since 2012, Labour has joined NZ First, the Greens and Mana in jingoistic campaigns against Chinese investment, including in the dairy industry and has blamed Chinese buyers for the expanding housing crisis.

The opposition of Labour and its allies to the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has also been based on anti-foreigner sentiment and designed to bolster the position of New Zealand employers against overseas competitors. These campaigns, supported by Labour’s apologists including the unions and pseudo-lefts, dovetail with their support for New Zealand’s alliance with US imperialism and its military build-up against China.

The Labour Party was steeped in nationalism and xenophobia from its foundation. After World War I, Labour, like its counterpart in Australia, campaigned for severe restrictions on Asian immigration. It supported legislation in 1920 designed to exclude Chinese immigrants, known unofficially as a “White New Zealand policy,” which remained in place under successive Labour and conservative governments for more than 50 years. Under conditions of rising economic crisis, social distress and impending imperialist wars, the Labour Party is reviving these foul traditions.

Michigan Kids Count report shows drastic rise in child poverty over last decade

Zac Corrigan

Child poverty and officially reported cases of abuse and neglect have risen drastically in recent years in the state of Michigan, according to the 2016 Kids Count report released last week by the Michigan League for Public Policy.

The annual report shows that child poverty has increased in 80 of Michigan’s 83 counties over the period 2006-2014. Statewide, child poverty increased by 23 percent, and child abuse and neglect by a shocking 29 percent. Nearly one quarter of Michigan’s children now live in official poverty.

Michigan’s child poverty rate of 22.6 percent (492,257 children) is slightly worse than national rate of 22 percent. The latter figure represents 16 million children nationwide who live below the official poverty line. The definition of poverty used by the Kids Count report is the US Federal Poverty Level, which is set at $24,250 per year for a family of four, a grossly inadequate amount of money.

The report’s authors note that the most “startling” statewide child well-being figures include the following:

• Child poverty is even higher among minority groups: Forty-seven percent of Michigan’s African-American children and 32 of Hispanic children live in poverty.
• Thirty-two percent of children live in households where no one has secure employment.
• Sixty-seven percent of children aged 0-5 years have both parents in the workforce.
• On average, child care expenses represent 40 percent of minimum wage earnings.

The authors also note that 17 percent of children in Michigan live in high-poverty neighborhoods, including more than half (55 percent) of African-American children, and nearly a third (30 percent) of Hispanic children.

The report ranks Michigan’s 83 counties by “Overall Child Well-Being”—a term which includes poverty strictly-defined, but also things like food security, infant/child mortality, child abuse/neglect, and proficiency of school-children in English and math. It finds that the seven lowest-ranking counties are rural counties where the vast majority of residents are white. Eighth-worst is Genesee County, where the city of Flint is located, which has been the focus of national attention for the ongoing lead in water crisis.

The Kids Count data shows how closely child abuse and neglect correlate to child poverty. Over the period 2006-2014, Michigan saw a 52 percent increase in child abuse and neglect investigations, resulting in a confirmed abuse/neglect rate increase of 29 percent. Thirty-three-thousand children were confirmed abused or neglected in 2014 alone.

The report defines neglect as “a child not receiving basic needs such as food, clothing or shelter; or not being protected from harm.” School teachers are required by law to report signs of child neglect, so a family that is homeless, living out of a vehicle, or unable to afford enough good food and clothing is at risk of being investigated.

The rate of children aged 0-5 years who are eligible for SNAP benefits (food stamps), and the rate of school-children eligible for free or reduced price school lunches, each also increased by 29 percent (to 31.9 percent, and 46.7 percent, respectively) over the same period—the exact same percentage increase as for child neglect. A separate study by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) published earlier this month shows that nearly one third of US households receiving SNAP benefits still cannot afford enough food and must rely on food pantries.

Parents can also be reported to the authorities if they fail to pay electric, heat or water bills. Michigan has some of the highest water and utility rates in the country. Indeed, another report published in February of this year shows that the city of Flint, Michigan has the absolute highest water rate in the country, even as its water supply continues to be systematically contaminated with lead. The average Flint household pays between $864 and $1680 annually for water. Genessee County, where Flint is located, has a child poverty rate of 33 percent.

The Kids Count data for Detroit, America’s poorest big city for more than a decade, are staggering. In 2014, 57.1 percent of Detroit children officially lived in poverty, an increase of 29 percent over 2006. Eighty-one percent lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. Ninety-four percent were insured by Medicaid, meaning they live in households with annual incomes less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($32,252 for a family of four). Detroit’s confirmed victims of child neglect and abuse rose 42 percent between 2006 and 2014.

The year 2014 saw the conclusion of the Detroit bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, in which the pensions of city workers were looted, and city assets and services were hived off and privatized in order to pay back the banks and wealthy bond holders who control the city. These cuts were rolled out as the Kids Count study concluded and their effects are not yet reflected in the data. Future Kids Count reports for Detroit will no doubt show even more devastating child impoverishment and well-being figures.

The central economic event in the period of 2006-2014 was the financial crash of 2008. In the years since, 95 percent of income gains nationally have gone to the richest one percent of the population, while most of the population has not recovered from the “Great Recession,” which officially ended in 2009. Late last year the labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent.

Democratic President Barack Obama, in office for six of the eight years covered by the study, has pursued a program that includes multi-trillion-dollar bail outs for the banks and financial institutions coupled with devastating attacks on the wages, pensions, health care, and billions in cuts to social programs for the working class and poor.

Obama has been aided by the trade unions, which have fought to stifle working class opposition to attacks on their living standards, particularly in Michigan, a historic center of auto manufacturing. In 2009, as a condition of the auto bailout Obama cut the wages of Big Three autoworkers in half, and in 2015 the UAW resorted to ballot-stuffing, breaking their own by-laws, and hiring a public relations firm to impose another sellout contract upon autoworkers.

German government increases defence budget and plans massive rearmament

Johannes Stern

On Wednesday, the German cabinet adopted a four year budget plan that would dramatically increase spending on the military, police, and intelligence services.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble (Christian Democrats, CDU) did not mince words at a press conference Wednesday, declaring, “The central points of this budget and finance plan are of course the internal and external security of our country.”

In an overview on the finance ministry’s official website, it states on the key point of external security, “Given the variety and changing nature of the tasks of the German army, as part of international coalitions as well as alliance and national defence, the defence budget will be in the new finance plan by a total of around €10.2 billion.”

Specifically, the defence budget is to rise from €34.3 billion to €39.2 billion in 2020 (an increase of 14.3 percent). The majority of funds will flow into the rearmament of the army, for which fully €9.4 billion is to be set aside. The second-largest category is “international deployments” with over €1 billion.

Along with the German army, the intelligence agencies and security apparatus are being significantly strengthened. According to the finance ministry, “the spending on internal security […will be] increased by around €2.1 billion by 2020, an above average increase.” Key points would be “the new programme to strengthen the security agencies as well as the federal police.”

The interior ministry (BMI), bragged on its official website that its budget would surpass €8 billion for the first time. In its 2016 budget, the government provided an additional 750 employees for the security services and equipment worth €328 million by 2019. In addition, 3,000 new positions with the federal police have been created. The BMI would be continuing along this route with the 2017 budget. Among the items decided were “further strengthening of the security agencies with an additional security package of equipment totalling €630 million by 2020.”

In reality, spending on internal and external security is even higher. The €10 billion officially made available to “overcome the challenge of the refugee influx” will be available for, among other things, combatting the “causes of flight”—the new euphemism for the army’s interventions in North Africa and the Middle East. The federal police and ministry for migration and refugees will also receive additional funds from the “refugee pot” so they can increase personnel.

While the government is spending billions on internal and external security, other areas are being cut. “Budget discipline also means critically examining the efficacy and efficiency of measures and programmes,” the budget agreement states. Among other things, so-called spending reviews will be conducted “in the areas of housing funding and funding programmes in the sphere of energy transition and climate protection.”

It is already clear that the increases for the interior and defence ministries are only the beginning of a more comprehensive rearmament programme. In January, defence minister Ursula Von der Leyen held out the prospect of an additional €130 billion for the military by 2030 and presented a paper to the defence committee in the Bundestag calling for the purchase of hundreds of tanks, artillery pieces, naval helicopters and other large items of military equipment.

Defence policy spokespeople from the governing and opposition parties criticised the increased spending as inadequate. Florian Hahn, defence policy spokesman for the CSU, told Die Welt, “the scale is nevertheless unsatisfactory.” The “investment package demanded by the minister” was “not covered” and the insufficient injection of funds was the “wrong signal” and left “doubts among the troops whether we are confronting the shortages with sufficient seriousness.”

Rainer Arnold, the defence spokesman for the Social Democrats, went even further and described the benchmark figures as “disappointing.” The defence budget was increasing, “but given the lack of equipment and the requirement for increased personnel in the army” it “fell far short.” The adopted increases were “utterly inadequate” and “particularly given the lack of equipment, a real blow.” With an army “which in part only functions on paper”, Germany would “not be equal to the rising security policy demands.”

Green parliamentary deputy Tobias Lindner, who is a member of the budgetary and defence committee in parliament, sounded a similar note. He criticised the fact that “the defence minister’s wish list [is] much larger than the extra means allocated to her by Wolfgang Schäuble.” In addition, “the majority of the spending [is] for the period after the current electoral cycle,” and this meant it was “completely unclear whether Von der Leyen would be in office and a new government will continue this course.”

Interior minister Thomas de Maizière, who has been pushing for strengthened internal security for years, announced in a statement that by the finalization of a draft budget, he would “agree” with Schäuble “on a significant increase of personnel, particularly for the authorities concerned with combatting terrorism.” The issue was to make “the security agencies as ready to strike as possible.” For this, they would need “good protective equipment, the newest technology, weapons and vehicles.”

While politicians and the media are trying to portray the militarization of German foreign policy and the building up of a police state as a response to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, these measures have been long planned and have been the government’s goal from the outset.

The coalition deal between the CDU, CSU and SPD titled “Framing Germany’s future” identified these goals in the autumn of 2013. These included “strengthening the federal police as a competent and effective criminal police force,” “modernising the federal police’s operational equipment” and a “better cooperative relationship between the security agencies.”

In the section “Responsibility in the world,” it stated, “We support a strong defence force with modern and capable armed forces. … The Bundeswehr is an intervention army. With its new direction it will also be directed at the changed security policy conditions of the 21st century. We will firmly continue this reorientation and lead it to success,” which will require “a broad spectrum of military capabilities.”

Global oil industry job losses continue to mount

Tom Hall

Job losses continue to mount as investment in new drilling projects has plummeted in response to the collapse in oil prices over the last year and a half. While oil prices are generally believed to have bottomed out and have begun a modest recovery, prices still remain at around 60 percent of their 2014 highs when oil traded for more than $100 per barrel.

The crisis is particularly pronounced in the United States, where oil companies poured massive amounts of money into investment projects after the 2008 financial crisis to take advantage of rising oil prices. Since January 2015, 15,700 jobs in oil and gas and nearly 100,000 jobs in supporting industries have been lost in the US, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over that same span, the number of US oil and gas rigs has collapsed from 1,811 to only 489, or a staggering 73% in a little more than a year, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. The traditional oil producing state of Texas has accounted for nearly one-half of these closures with 614, while oil production in the state of Utah has been wiped out entirely.

Extrapolating from studies on the economic impact of oil well closures, the Brookings Institution estimates that the long-term effects of these closures could lead to 226,000 to 296,000 job losses nationwide. In North Dakota, where the state’s largest oil producer, Whiting Petroleum, decided last month to suspend major operations in the state, this decline would represent over 7 percent of the state’s total number of employed.

Emboldened by the easy-money policies of the Federal Reserve and the infrastructure boom in China, which propped up global commodities prices for years after the 2008 financial crisis, US oil companies loaded up on debt to the tune of an estimated $237 billion to finance major drilling projects. In particular, these projects relied upon new, environmentally destructive fracking technologies to access previously untapped and difficult-to-reach oil reserves.

The collapse in oil prices beginning in 2014 left the US oil industry particularly exposed, which had nearly doubled its production since 2007. Bankruptcy filings in the oil and gas industry shot up 379 percent in 2015, encompassing at least 67 firms, and Fortune Magazine argues that this number could grow six fold in 2016. “By the time this is over this might be the worst of all the [oil] busts,” one oil executive told the Washington Post.

The international situation looks little better. The Deloitte consulting firm predicts that as many as one-third of all global oil companies are at risk of bankruptcy this year, with the 175 most at-risk companies holding more than $150 billion in debt. A global survey of oil and gas executives found that nearly 75 percent “were preparing their companies for a sustained period of low oil prices, with job cuts one of the top three methods they cited to control costs,” according to a CNBC report. Thirty-one percent of respondents expected further cuts to employment over the current year, an increase of 6 percent over last year.

Far from signaling a return to health for the industry, a major factor behind the bottoming out of oil over the past few months has been the collapse in output among non-OPEC oil producers.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) in March estimated that oil production among non-OPEC countries will fall by 750,000 barrels per day in 2016, up from its previous estimate of 600,000. Among non-OPEC oil producers outside the US, according to a report in the British Telegraph, the collapse in output among these countries has proceeded at four times the rate expected by analysts at the IEA, with net output declining by 220,000 barrels per day in China, Russia, Mexico, Canada and the North Sea.

Pressures on the North Sea led to an estimated 65,000 job losses in Britain last year, with possibly 45,000 more jobs on the block for 2016. In Norway, which also borders the North Sea, an estimated 200,000 jobs are threatened by the crisis of the oil industry in that country. The collapse in oil prices has caused a crunch in new investments, with an estimated $380 billion in planned oil projects being put on hold.

In spite of a modest increase in oil prices to roughly $40 per barrel, a major longer-term concern for oil companies continues to be slumping demand in China, which accounted for 35 percent of global demand since 2000, according to a report by Forbes. The IEA’s forecast for growth in Chinese demand this year is an anemic 330,000 barrels per day, well below the 10-year average of 440,000. The drying up of Chinese demand over the past two years has contributed to a collapse in commodities prices across the board.

For the oil industry, additional downward pressure on prices has been produced by the refusal of Saudi Arabia to cut oil production in the face of slumping demand. While this has been done in large measure to force out its competitors in other parts of the world, geopolitical concerns are also a major consideration for Saudi Arabia.

As one commentator in Forbes candidly put it, “[What Saudi Arabia cares about] is Russia and Iran being able to fund destabilizing groups that threaten their regime. Keeping oil down helps the US and somewhat prevents Russia and Iran from funding these groups to the point they can win.” By “destabilizing groups,” the commentator euphemistically refers to Russia and Iran’s opposition to the US-led proxy war in Syria, where US and Saudi-backed Islamic fundamentalists have played a leading role.

The author continues: “What’s happening right now is to artificially pump oil into the market to depress the prices such that ISIS and Putin will run out of funds for their adventures. It’s not a coincidence that the oil price started tanking when Putin invaded Ukraine,” again referring euphemistically to Russia’s opposition to the toppling of the government of neighboring Ukraine by fascist thugs backed by the US.

Terrorist attack hits crowded children’s park in Pakistan

Sampath Perera

A bomb blast in Pakistan at a crowded children’s park in a residential area of Lahore on Sunday evening has killed at least 69 people and injured 300 others. The atrocity, which was clearly designed to cause a maximum loss of life, is suspected to have been carried out by a suicide bomber who set off the explosion in a parking lot, just metres from children’s swings.

“When the blast occurred, the flames were so high they reached above the trees and I saw bodies flying in the air,” a witness told Reuters. The number of dead and injured is still rising with the majority women and children. The blast also caused a stampede leading to more casualties as panicked and stunned survivors tried to escape the crowded park and surrounding neighbourhood.

According to the Washington Post, Jamaat ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), claimed responsibility for the attack. A spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan declared that “the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter” were the target. The blast, he said, was to send “a message to the government” that more attacks would come until Sharia or Islamic law is imposed in Pakistan.

While terrorist attacks are less frequent in Punjab province, of which Lahore is the capital, Christians and other religious minorities are often targeted elsewhere in Pakistan by Sunni Islamic fundamentalists. According to a tally by the Pakistan-based Nation, 1,700 people have died in 117 attacks over the last four years.

Regardless of who carried out the heinous crime on Sunday, it serves reactionary ends. The attack will be used to justify the further militarisation of the country, increase Pakistan’s support for the US neo-colonial occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan and expand the powers of the Pakistani military. The country’s armed forces wield enormous economic and political power and have ruled the country with Washington’s support for decades, most recently under General Pervez Musharraf between 1999 and 2008.

The TTP’s attack in December 2014 on a military-supported school in Peshawar that killed 133 children was immediately exploited by the current Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) government with the backing of the political establishment. The PML-N government gave extraordinary powers to the military under expanded “anti-terrorism” laws, including the re-establishment of a military court system that can try civilians in secret session. The army immediately escalated its occupation of Karachi under the guise of cracking down on “crime” and “terrorism.”

Following the 2014 attack, the government also lifted a moratorium on executions imposed in 2008, leading to a spate of hangings. According to a Reuters report, only 39 of the 351 executed “involved people linked to a known militant group or guilty of crimes linked to militancy.” In 2015, Pakistan carried out the third highest number of executions in the world.

The Pakistani government “strongly” condemned Sunday’s terror bombing, as did the US. “Attacks like these only deepen our shared resolve to defeat terrorism around the world,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price declared that the US would work with Pakistan “to root out the scourge of terrorism.”

Such language only means that US imperialism will intensify its intervention in the region which has already been deeply destabilised by its efforts to bully Pakistan to “do more” to support American geo-strategic objectives.

Despite these official denunciations, the ultimate responsibility for the latest atrocity lies with Washington and Islamabad that have both promoted reactionary Islamism and used it to justify their wars.

During the 1980s, as it sought to create “a Vietnam” for the Soviet Union, the US financed, organised, and armed the Mujahedeen militias to topple the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. It also propped up General Zia ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Islamabad which turned Pakistan into a conduit for Islamists. At the same time, General Zia carried out a brutal “Islamising” campaign of the country directed at suppressing the working class in Pakistan.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Kabul were the consequences of this massive CIA-led operation. Following the September 11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to overthrow the Taliban and force Pakistan to break its ties to the Taliban regime. Washington also demanded that Islamabad prop up the US occupation of Afghanistan by suppressing anti-occupation militias based along the border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan.

The Pakistani military has carried out a series of devastating military expeditions to occupy the historically-autonomous FATA regions, provoking bitter opposition. The US invasion of Afghanistan and the Pakistani military operations have led to the rise of what became known as the TTP. Also known as the Pakistan Taliban, it is an umbrella group which is ideologically affiliated to, but distinct from, the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The sheer brutality of the Pakistani military offensives and the CIA-run drone war in the FATA which terrorised the entire population, killing and maiming thousands of civilians, including women and children, has resulted in an increasing number of terrorist attacks in other parts of Pakistan. The worst hit have been religious minorities who are increasingly the victims of sectarian violence.

Following the December 2014 Peshawar terror attacks, the Pakistani military, in close collaboration with Washington, has been waging a war in North Waziristan and the FATA tribal agencies. This offensive has triggered a massive humanitarian crisis displacing more than a million people, most of them forced to flee and live in squalid refugee camps.

After Sunday’s blast, Pakistan’s military top-brass, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other intelligence agencies, was hurriedly convened in parallel with a meeting by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and senior government figures. As in the wake of the Peshawar school attack what is now under consideration is a new wave of military attacks in the FATA regions, accompanied by further anti-democratic measures, which further expand Pakistan’s devastating civil war.

The US-NATO war in Syria and the Brussels terror attacks

Alex Lantier

As revelations mount of police foreknowledge of the March 22 Brussels bombings, the central question that is emerging is why the security forces of Belgium and its NATO allies did not move to stop the attacks. That the Belgian state had detailed prior knowledge of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) network that carried out the bombings is emerging in numerous press reports.

On Sunday, the Sunday Times carried an interview with Alexandrino Rodrigues, the landlord of the flat in the Schaerbeek neighbourhood where the March 22 attackers raised suspicions by releasing chemical odours as they built the bombs they later took to Zaventem Airport. Police had previously gone to the apartment and knocked on the door, apparently without entering. “There were investigations before and after the events” of March 22, Rodrigues said, adding, “You can’t catch a rabbit without knowing where it lives.”

Police rapidly moved on the Schaerbeek apartment after the airport bombings, sealing it off only 90 minutes after the attack. Police said they had been alerted by a tip from the taxi driver who drove the bombers to the airport. However, the taxi driver subsequently contradicted this account, saying he had alerted police only after a photo of the attackers was released several hours later, leaving unexplained how police reacted so quickly.

This story, the New York Times wrote, is “raising questions about whether the police had perhaps already had the building in their sights but, for some reason, had not moved in and smashed through the front door of the sixth-floor apartment until it was too late.”

This news came after Friday’s reports that police knew the location of the hideout of Salah Abdeslam, the ISIS fugitive wanted in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, throughout the four months in which he was described as “Europe’s most wanted” man, until his capture on March 18. Police did not try to apprehend him for the entire period. Once he was captured, moreover, he received only a perfunctory two-hour interrogation. Though he knew several of the March 22 attackers, including Najim Laachraoui, he was reportedly not asked whether any other attacks were being prepared.

The New York Times’ characterization of these events as a “trail of dots not connected,” echoing the official position of the Belgian government, does not hold water. In reality, this attack, like the two ISIS attacks in Paris last year, are the product of the reckless and reactionary decision of Washington and its major European allies to mobilize Islamist militias to wage a proxy war for regime change in Syria.

For years, a small army of European Islamist fighters has been traveling back and forth between Europe and Syria to carry out raids and terror bombings aimed at destabilizing and toppling President Bashar al-Assad’s government. A Europe1 report last December, citing the New York-based private intelligence firm Soufan Group, estimated the number of foreign Islamist fighters in Syria at between 27,000 and 31,000. These included 5,000 Europeans, with 1,700 from France alone.

Other major contributors were the Maghreb, with 8,000 fighters (including 6,000 from Tunisia), the Middle East, with over 8,000 fighters (including 2,500 Saudis), and Russia and Central Asia, with 4,500 (including 2,400 Russians).

Such a vast and undisturbed flow of fighters could not proceed without the knowledge of the intelligence agencies, many of which have worked closely with these proxy forces in Syria to plan attacks on Assad’s troops and on Syrian civilians. This is why those leading the major ISIS attacks in Europe—the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo, November 13 attack leader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and the El Bakraoui brothers in Brussels—were to a man well known to the security services. It is evident that protocols were in place for their movements to proceed unhindered, so they could plan and execute attacks.

“Europe knew exactly what was happening, but they started a blame game and said the entire problem was on the Turkish-Syrian border,” a senior Turkish security official told the Guardian.

This official complained that European intelligence agencies did not help Ankara track European Islamists arriving in Turkey to go to Syria, and even helped Islamist fighters deported from Turkey return there, the Guardian reported, quoting him as saying, “Without European intelligence backing, [Turkey] could only prosecute them for attempting to illegally cross into Syria and deport them back to Europe. Some of those deported were later given new passports and allowed to travel back to Turkey.”

The handful of alleged ISIS accomplices, logistical aides and document forgers now being arrested in police raids—seven in Brussels, two in Paris, several more in Germany and Italy—are a tiny part of the vast network built up during NATO’s war in Syria. Viewed in this context, European officials’ carefully worded statements on the attacks make clear that their security forces are badly stretched by the Islamist operations they have unleashed.

“We have had results to find the terrorists and, both in Brussels and in Paris, there have been a certain number of arrests that took place,” French President François Hollande said Friday, “but we know there are other networks. Even if the network that committed the Paris and Brussels attacks is on the way to being annihilated, a threat remains.”

“The threat is unprecedented, and intelligence and domestic law enforcement agencies appear to be overwhelmed by the numbers involved,” said Aaron Stein of the Atlantic Council think tank.

The conflict is all the more bitter because, through the Brussels attacks, ISIS is intervening in a raging debate over the war within the foreign policy establishments of the NATO powers, fuelled by the stark reversals suffered by their proxy forces at the hands of Syrian government forces backed by Russian air power.

These conflicts emerged publicly on Saturday with reports that a Pentagon-backed ethnic Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, was engaging in gun battles with an Arab Islamist militia backed by the CIA and Turkey, the Fursan al-Haq (“Army of Righteousness”). This brought US military and Turkish officials to “loggerheads,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.

Turkey fears that Syrian Democratic Forces victories in Syria could lead to the formation of an independent Kurdish state on Turkey’s southern border, stoking up separatist sentiment among Kurds across the border in Turkey itself.

As these conflicts erupt on the ground in Syria, correspondingly violent debates are proceeding behind the scenes in the offices and agencies of the major NATO powers, as they debate how to respond to the Russian military intervention in Syria.

The Syrian government, which recently recaptured Palmyra, has been vastly strengthened by Russian operations and airstrikes. Speaking yesterday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” program upon his return from talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, US Secretary of State John Kerry indicated that Washington was considering taking a more conciliatory stance toward Russia.

Kerry said, “Russia has helped to bring about the Iran nuclear agreement, Russia helped to get the chemical weapons out of Syria. Russia is now helping with the cessation of hostilities [in Syria]. And if Russia can help us to actually effect this political transition—that is all to the strategic interests of the Unites States of America.”

Such proposals pose a deadly threat to ISIS, its fighters in Syria, and its recruiting networks and operatives internationally, all of which are products of the US-led imperialist wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The Brussels attacks have the character of a bloody signal from ISIS that, due to its substantial logistical infrastructure within Europe, it can retaliate against Russian airstrikes and a possible cut-off of NATO support in Syria with deadly terror attacks in Europe and beyond.

The victims of such atrocities, and the criminal policies of the imperialist powers that ultimately spawned them, are innocent civilians across the Middle East and North Africa, and increasingly within Europe itself.

Clinton primary contest losses intensify Democratic Party crisis

Joseph Kishore

Bernie Sanders scored landslide victories over Hillary Clinton in Democratic Party caucuses held Saturday in Washington state, Hawaii and Alaska. 

The scale of the defeats for Clinton, the presumptive front-runner in the contest for the presidential nomination, was overwhelming in all three states. In Washington’s caucuses, Sanders beat Clinton by 73 percent to 27 percent. In Alaska, the margin was 82 percent to 18 percent. Sanders won the Hawaii caucuses by 70 percent to 30 percent.

The Vermont senator has won six of the last seven Democratic Party contests, including last Tuesday’s victories in Utah and Idaho. Clinton won in Arizona the same day.

Turnout for the weekend caucuses, which generally involve far fewer participants than elections, approached or exceeded records set in 2008, including at least 225,000 in Washington. A report in the Atlantic noted that Sanders “won from wall to wall,” adding, “He took every county in Washington, and in Alaska, he posted double-digit margins in all 40 districts.”

These votes have deepened the political crisis in the Democratic Party. Even a Clinton victory over a candidate who describes himself as “socialist,” if the margin of victory were small, would be of great significance. During the 1968 Democratic Party primary campaign, which unfolded amidst growing opposition to the Vietnam War, Senator Eugene McCarthy’s performance in the New Hampshire primary, in which he won 42 percent to Lyndon B. Johnson’s 49 percent, was considered a near-fatal blow to the sitting president. It helped precipitate Johnson’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race three weeks later.

It is extraordinary that Clinton, who has emerged as the political personification of the status quo, is not only losing, but being trounced in so many states. She is being routed in many contests under conditions where she is presented as the all-but-inevitable winner of the nomination process. Her defeats are a repudiation of calls from leading Democratic Party officials, including President Obama, for Sanders to end his campaign. In a political system that was in any way responsive to popular discontent, Clinton’s candidacy would be considered doomed.

The general media line notwithstanding, the issue is not so much who has the most delegates, but the political dynamic at work. Even if Sanders is not able to surpass Clinton’s still sizable lead, due to a significant degree to the pledges of so-called “super delegates”—party operatives, officeholders and politicians who are not elected in primaries and caucuses—it will be impossible to conceal the fact that the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer is deeply unpopular.

The eventual outcome of the nomination process—for both the Democrats and Republicans—remains highly volatile and unpredictable. What is clear, however, is that the two-party system, through which the American capitalist class has exercised its rule nearly 150 years, is breaking apart.

The social anger that has built up over decades, vastly intensified since the crash of 2008, is beginning to find political expression. The United States is riven by extreme levels of social inequality, with a handful of billionaires controlling more wealth than the bottom half of the population. To this must be added the destabilizing consequences of a quarter-century of unending war, particularly in the decade-and-a-half of the “war on terror.”

More and more, this underlying reality is breaking through the ossified structure of American politics. Expressing the shock this has produced within the political establishment, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof recently made the remarkable admission that he—along with the rest of the media—“were largely oblivious to the pain among working class Americans.”

While Kristof was referring to the support for Trump among sections of workers, the basic trajectory of the American working class is not to the right, but to the left.

Support for Sanders is the initial expression of a broadly felt anticapitalist sentiment among workers, and particularly among younger voters who have seen nothing but economic crisis and war for their entire politically conscious lives. Sanders, who has had far less media coverage than the other major candidates, has received 1.5 million votes from those under 30 in the primary process prior to Saturday, 300,000 more than Clinton and Trump combined.

These numbers express deeper social trends and corresponding changes in political consciousness. A survey by YouGov released earlier this year found that Americans under the age of 30 rated socialism as better than capitalism (43 percent had a favorable opinion of socialism versus 32 percent who had a favorable opinion of capitalism). Sixteen percent of those under the age of 30 described themselves as socialist, while only 11 percent said they were capitalist.

Another recent poll found that among those age 18 to 35, 56.5 percent described themselves as “working class”—a term that is virtually proscribed in American politics and banned from the media. The percentage of those describing themselves as “middle class” has fallen steadily, from 45.6 percent in 2002 to a record low 34.8 percent in 2014.

While the evident willingness of millions of American workers and young people to consider socialism as an alternative to the existing capitalist system has come as a shock to the political establishment, this development is a striking confirmation of the political program and perspective published by the Socialist Equality Party in 2010. The SEP anticipated a profound shift in the political consciousness of the working class:

In the final analysis, the vast wealth and power of American capitalism was the most significant objective cause of the subordination of the working class to the corporate-controlled two-party system. As long as the United States was an ascending economic power, perceived by its citizens as “the land of unlimited opportunity,” in which a sufficient share of the national wealth was available to finance rising living standards, American workers were not convinced of the necessity of socialist revolution.

The change in the objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society. The younger generation of working people – those born in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century – do not know, and will never know, capitalist “prosperity.” They are the first generation of Americans in modern times who cannot reasonably expect to achieve a living standard equal to, let alone better than, their parents’ generation.” [The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States]

The scale of his support has taken the Sanders campaign itself by surprise. It reflects an emerging revolutionary potential that is entirely unacceptable to the candidate and the mildly reformist sections of the Democratic Party establishment for which he speaks. It has never been Sanders’ intention or desire to lead a popular movement against capitalism. From the beginning, his campaign was intended to serve as a safety valve for the political establishment.

As the campaign progresses, the contradiction between Sanders’ own objectives and the aims of those who have supported him will inevitably emerge. Aware of the dangers involved, Sanders spoke out of both sides of his mouth in interviews over the weekend. Asked whether he had any conditions for endorsing Clinton if she won the nomination—including that she support his campaign planks of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage and free tuition at public colleges—Sanders evaded the question. He said it was a “misinterpretation of what I said” to suggest that there were any conditions, while refraining from saying directly that he would back Clinton.

But when he announced his bid for the Democratic nomination last year, Sanders pledged to support the eventual nominee, whoever he or she was. And in the course of the primary contests, he repeatedly promoted his campaign as the most effective means of increasing the turnout for the Democratic Party in the November general election.

Sanders’ campaign slogans—denouncing the “billionaire class” and a political system dominated by corporate money—address only certain surface aspects of American society, but by no means go to the source of mass discontent—the capitalist system itself.

The issues that are driving the working class into political struggle—the fight against war, inequality and the destruction of democratic rights—cannot be resolved without a decisive break with the Democratic Party and the building of an independent political movement of the working class on the basis of a genuinely socialist program. This means a fight to unite workers throughout the world in a common struggle to overturn the capitalist system, replacing it with a rationally planned and democratically controlled economy based on social need, not private profit.

The crisis of the two-party system revealed in the elections underscores the urgency of the building of the Socialist Equality Party to intervene in the struggles of the working class and provide the necessary revolutionary leadership.

Bin Laden Won the War on Terror

Ben Debney

The idea for this article came to me after the shootings in San Bernadino; all it really required was another atrocity to give it legs. A dysfunctional part of me hoped I might get out of having to write it. If the War on Terror was ever meant to be won, by now it must be classed as a monumental failure for the West. Any conventional war that becomes bogged down in a protracted quagmire is generally regarded as a zero sum gain at best.

The roots of the War on Terror in moral panic narratives means that we rarely seem to even ask the question as to whether or not it’s actually getting us anywhere. If we don’t care that it isn’t, that begs the question as to the role War on Terror narratives play in public discourse, whether we care if our ideas mean anything or whether we just care about being right.

Between the rise of Islamic State, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the second round of Paris attacks, San Bernadino and now Belgium, all prominently displayed in the media because the perpetrators are not on our side and the victims are affluent westerners, it does not seem that terrorism is going away. On the contrary, it seems that it has made more and bolder incursions into the bubbles of apathetic individualism that dominate the safe and conspicuously comfortable existences of those of us safely removed from the consequences of the military adventures instigated by our national governments.

Indeed, the apathy seems almost to extend to each atrocity now, as the ritual outrage from political leaders who have new ideas on how to deal with the problem of non-state terrorism other than to beat their chests and lower themselves to the level of those provoking them precipitates a marked war-weariness. To be sure, Osama Bin Laden and his associates responsible for the original great Atrocity in the West a decade and a half ago achieved their primary goal of provoking the Great Satan into expensive, economically self-destructive wars.

Then there were the useful side effect of polarizing West and Middle East, driving moderates into the arms of fundamentalists on both sides of the fence and enabling radical fundamentalists in Congress, who for their part were more than willing to oblige their Islamic counterparts by dismantling remaining democratic forms in the name of defending them from the loyal opposition who had the same goals.

In this sense the War on Terror was never anything more than therapeutic psychodrama, one in which ‘the emotional release of the protagonists takes precedence over what is actually being said . . . It is an expression of their pain and powerlessness confronted by the decay and dereliction, not only of their familiar environment, but of their own lives too — an expression for which our society provides no outlet’ (Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis).

Having been cast to this end as a War on Terror, the Western response to the terrorist attacks in the United States of 2001 has displayed characteristics that are far more accurately cast as moral panic. A number of key characteristics points inexorably towards this conclusion.

*The conflation in War on Terror narratives of object and relation, such that terrorism as a relational phenomenon in reality is reified into an object, one that can be demonized, targeted and attacked according to conventional means. The reification of terrorism from relation into object for this purpose also means that, rather than something that can be understood rationally, it functions instead as a propaganda trope — one that can never be defeated, but that nevertheless supplies virtually endless fuel to the fire of perpetual war.

*The reification of terrorism into an object that can be fought and defeated through conventional warfare as a subject of war propaganda necessitates application of the processes known to sociology as the ‘production of deviance’ and social psychology as ‘moral disengagement. In engaging in the production of deviance while giving way to moral disengagement, those responsible for creating War on Terror narratives rendered themselves cause and cure of the same problem, a paradox reflected in their tendency to perpetuate the feared outcomes of enemy success (eg. the destruction of what remains of civil society and democratic rights and freedoms) in the name of combating them.

*The systemic and deep-seated cognitive dissonance characteristic of War on Terror narratives between rhetoric and actions, as its proponents waged state terror utilizing literally the same methods and propaganda tropes that Adolf Hitler used to start World War II abroad, while dismantling what remained of democratic freedoms at home in the name of defending them from evildoers who hated freedom.

The events cast as a War on Terror, then, add up in the real world to a Terror Scare, a moral panic over terrorism. As a characteristic feature of this moral panic, therapeutic psychodrama expressed as War on Terror narratives have served to enable class war waged by the political classes of Western democracies against their own people, for the defense of the vested interests and class privileges of the opulent minorities on whose behalf the system of representative democracy was designed and in whose interests it has always functioned.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, but on the contrary entirely consistent with the prescription of James Madison articulated during the Constitutional Convention to the effect that the primary function of government should be to ‘protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.’ To the extent that that is the case, War on Terror narratives have served the same blame-shifting, scapegoating and generally distracting function that the Domino Theory played for western imperialists during the Cold War.

To the extent that those who have internalized the values, methods and goals of the Terror Scare as their own continue to parrot War on Terror mythologies as their own in militant ignorance of fact and militant defiance of logic and reason for the sake of enabling therapeutic psychodrama, we can assume that they neither expect or desire an end to war. On the contrary, the specter of terrorism reified through the conflation of object and relation into a propaganda motif and a moral panic trope provides an opportunity for perpetual war, a permanent scapegoat to blame for everything wrong with the world.

An ideological crutch of this kind only ever becomes more necessary as the consequences of lowering oneself to the level of those provoking us come home to revisit us, even if it was a convenient way to gain greater control over remaining oil supplies and buttress the petrodollar regime at the time. The destructive dynamic set in place only has one ending, just as there is only one person who really gains from it; no prizes for guessing who.

Imperial Math: Counting the Dead

Thomas S. Harrington

On Tuesday, immediately following the bloody attacks in Brussels, Michael Morrell, the former number-two at the CIA, proclaimed that ISIS is “winning” its ongoing confrontation with the US and the countries of Europe. “They’re winning, and we’re going to have to find additional approaches to try to undermine them.”

I am no expert on the metrics employed by military strategists to gauge success in armed conflicts. My guess, however, is that it all boils down to some combination of a) the ability to kill the highest possible number of the enemy’s combatants and their presumed supporters and b) the ability to inflict the greatest amount of damage and disruption on the social and physical infrastructure of the societies that the designated enemies are from, or are believed to identify with most strongly.

So let’s see how the scorecard between “us” and the societies where “our enemies” live and/or find their sense of cultural direction, plays out. The figures are culled from various sources readily available on the Internet.

Over the last 15 years Islamic militants have carried out five major coordinated attacks on US and western European targets (New York and Washington 2001, Madrid 2004, London 2005, Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016) killing some 3402 people. If we widen the scope of the inquiry to include Israelis under the umbrella of US-Western European culture and civilization (as they so often remind us should be the case) there are some 465 people more people for a total of 3867. If we widen the net further to include attacks that occurred in Russia along with all of the less massive attacks on US and European soil (a total of 693, mainly Russians), the number rises to 4560.

When it comes to the matter of destroyed infrastructure and enduring disruptions of daily life in the US and Western Europe, there’s really nothing to report. While the attacks have been psychologically terrifying, and a source of unending pain and grief for the families and loved ones of those whose lives were cruelly extinguished, the attacks have done virtually nothing to alter our ability to live and work as we did before.

It is true we are now constantly spied on by our own government and subject to ritualized rape at airports, but that’s it.

Those of us who had food, fuel, shelter, schools and electricity before the attacks, generally still have all those things now. And very few, if any, people in Europe or the US have been driven out of their homes because of these armed attacks on our societies.

Let’s look now at the countries whose Islamic “cultures of hate”, we are constantly told, generate an unending supply of people willing to kill us for no apparent reason.

How have they done in regard to the attacks carried out on them the US and its allies?

According to Brown University’s Costs of War Study 92,00 Afghans have been killed since the US in invasion of that country in 2001 and 165,00 Iraqis killed as a result of war in that country since the US invasion of it in 2003. In Pakistan, they estimate 57,000 Pakistanis have been killed since the US began its covert war on that country in 2004-2005. And these are, by the authors’ own reckoning, conservative estimates.

In Libya, which was gratuitously destroyed by the US and the Europeans at the urging of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, good statistics are hard to come by. But it appears that some 3,000 people were killed as a direct result of the Allied bombing campaign in 2011, and that several times number have died as a result of the massive sectarian unleashed by the conflict.

How about Syria? There, a Civil War was nearing its conclusion in 2013 with a quite probable Assad victory when, US and its allies (Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) decided to intervene—as Sidney Blumenthal’s recently uncovered emails to Hillary Clinton confirm—in the hope of engineering a bloody and protracted standoff, the long-term goal of which was to insure that Syria not be able to act serve as a regional counterweight to Israel or Turkey for at least the next generation.

According to the UN, over 250,000 have now died in the war, and almost 75% of those deaths have occurred since the US and its allies got more heavily involved in the conflict in late 2013.

In the same 15 year period since 2001, the US’ most important strategic “friend”, Israel, has carried out three assaults (2006, 2008-09 and 2014) on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, killing a total of some 4000 Palestinians. Total Israeli deaths from those assaults, which our corrupt and prostituted media insist on referring to as “wars”, are 95.

In 2006, Israel also assaulted its neighbor to the north, Lebanon, a country whose lower quarter it had already subjected to military occupation from 1982 to 2000. The result of this attack were 1200 Lebanese dead. The Israeli losses (remember, as was the case with most of the Israelis lost in the Gaza assaults these were troops aggressively invading a sovereign country) were 165.

Over the last few years, Saudi Arabia, the medieval dictatorship that arouses nothing but warm ejaculations of fraternal love in Washington and in European chanceries has carried out a) a bloody assault on Bahrain, which killed 90 and rooted out whatever pro-democratic forces the country might have had and b) a brutal air war with US-made equipment and logistical guidance in Yemen against the Houthis, attacks which resulted in the death of 2800 civilians in 2015 alone.

Then there is the US-backed coup Government of general Al-Sisi in Egypt which, according to Human Rights Watch, carried out the “premeditated” massacre of 817 peaceful protesters on at Rabaa Square in Cairo on August 14th , 2013

There’s also also the ongoing US-led drone and special forces war on Somalia where at the very least 250 Somalis have perished at the hands of these forces.

And then there the big one that absolutely no one talk about, but that is key to truly understanding the current tensions in Francophone Europe: Algeria.

True, most of deaths there occurred before 2001, and are thus, strictly speaking, outside the parameters that have governed our exposition to this point.

But the fact that the government perpetrators of the majority of these deaths have never been brought to justice, and indeed have officially been shielded from any prosecution, means that the wounds generated by this conflict are still very much with us, especially in France, the north African country’s former colonial master, where very large numbers of Algerians and their French-born children live and work

What happened there?

In 1991, Islamists in in that country were on their way to an apparent electoral victory in the coming elections when the US and French-backed government staged a coup. Over the next 15 years it brutally hunted down anyone and anything connected with the Islamist politics. Once the conflict got under way, there were, of course atrocities that went in the other direction as well. But let there be no doubt, the war, which generated some 200.000 deaths had its origin in the fact that a social and governmental elite backed by Western powers did not want to allow Algerian democracy to run its course.

How are things washing out for “our enemies” in terms of the second metric for war “success” mentioned above: the destruction of physical infrastructure and the widespread disruption of daily life for the majority of the population?

Well, Iraq, Libya Gaza, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria are now widely viewed as completely failed polities where the daily fight to survive requires almost every ounce of energy that citizens there possess. With the possible exception of its capital city, the same can be said of Afghanistan. While things are perhaps more tolerable there on the level of day- to-day rhythms, Egypt and Algeria and Lebanon are now veritable nests of fear and loathing where people know a few Ill-chosen words can earn you a full lifetime or a or a full deathtime of trouble.

But Michael Morrell, who has all these facts and much, much more information at his disposal, says “we” are losing the fight against “them”?

Could it be that Morrell, an economist by training, is that bad at numbers?

No, it’s just that he’s a practitioner of a new and rapidly expanding scientific discipline, “Imperial Math” which, by injecting heaping doses of racism and systematic dehumanization into its calculations and equations, consistently concludes that a four digit numbers like 4560 are always greater that ever-rising six and seven digit figures.