Calls for Canada to develop cyberwar capabilities

Dylan Lubao

Canada’s spy agencies and military should be upgraded to better carry out offensive cyber warfare attacks against “foreign adversaries,” a strategy paper published in July by a Canadian military think tank argued.

Titled “Canada and Cyber Warfare,” and written by retired Major General John Adams for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI), the paper urges that Canada improve its capability to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the computer networks of its foreign rivals.

Adams is the former head of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s signals intelligence service. He has been a leading spokesman for the drive to expand the domestic and foreign powers of both CSE and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canada’s domestic spy agency. Adams has previously boasted of CSE’s deep integration in the US National Security Agency’s illegal spy operations, with the aim of “mastering the internet.”

The basic arguments Adams puts forward in his paper have been used time and again to push for greater powers for the spy agencies and sweeping attacks on democratic rights. Vague and unsubstantiated claims are made about cyberattacks on sensitive computer infrastructure by foreign governments or terrorist groups—attacks which are supposedly difficult for Canada to fend off due to outdated equipment or legal barriers.

Other high-ranking former members of Canada’s national security apparatus have also weighed in. Ray Boisvert, a former Assistant Director of CSIS, has complained that Canada’s cyber warfare capabilities remain “rudimentary at best” and woefully underfunded.

The mounting demands for Canada to develop offensive cyber warfare capabilities are rooted in the growing tensions between the major powers internationally and the realization within Canada’s ruling elite that to assert its imperialist interests it must prepare for war.

In recent years, the United States has frequently resorted to claims of cyberattacks from hostile countries to stoke tensions with its geopolitical rivals, above all Russia and China. President Obama unveiled a vast array of new cyber policing powers last year to tackle alleged threats, while earlier this year Germany established a new department in its Defence Ministry and created a new branch of its military to wage cyberwar, including offensive operations.

Adams’ paper defines cyberspace as a domain comprised of the internet and other network infrastructure used by governments, militaries, corporations, and other organizations to maintain the ever-expanding scope of “modern civilization.” It notes that cyberspace has “become the centre of gravity for the globalized world ... including military operations.”

It goes on to state that cyberspace has “become an emerging theatre of operations,” with successful attacks capable of crippling “the ability of states to function.” Adams presents cyber warfare as inherently “cheaper, cleaner and less risky for an attacker” and so capable of crippling target infrastructure that it may soon supersede physical warfare.

Cyber warfare is typically defined as falling into one of three categories:

• Computer network attacks: designed to disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy computer networks or the computers themselves
• Computer network exploitation: seizing intelligence-grade data
• Computer network defence: measures taken to protect one’s networks from cyberattacks

Adams, Boisvert and others are emphasizing the need to provide the spy agencies and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) with the resources and the mandate “to direct offensive action, in the form of cyber attacks,” something Adams laments they have lacked up to now. Failure to do so, warns

Adams, would be “neglectful beyond belief.”

Adams’ CGAI paper is directed at influencing the government’s Defence Policy Review, which in its “public consultation” paper itself raises the issue of how Canada should respond to the growing importance of cyber warfare.

Launched at the beginning of April, the review is the first in more than two decades. It is being used by the Trudeau Liberal government, the military-security establishment, and the corporate and financial elite to push for major hikes in military spending, the procurement of a vast array of new warplanes, battleships, submarines, and high tech weapons, and more aggressive use of the military to secure Canadian imperialism’s predatory interests.

In their ten months in office, the Liberals have dramatically expanded Canada’s participation in all three of Washington’s major geostrategic offensives—in the Middle East, where the US is seeking to overthrow Syria’s government as part of its drive to secure unchallenged domination of the world’s most important oil producing regime; against Russia; and against China.

In July, Trudeau announced that Canada would take the leadership and provide the bulk of the troops for one of four new NATO battalions being deployed on Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe. Under Trudeau’s government, Canada has also repeatedly voiced its support for the US’ provocative stance on the South China Sea dispute and expanded military-security ties with Washington’s closest ally in the Asia-Pacific, Japan

By posing the question of the type and size of investments required for cyber warfare systems, and the need to maintain interoperability with “key allies,” the Defence Policy Review consultation paper makes clear that the Liberals are also dead set on rapidly arming the spy agencies and military for offensive cyber warfare operations.

An example of the type of cyber warfare operations being considered is provided by the example of the 2010 Stuxnet virus, which was developed and deployed by a joint US-Israeli espionage team to target the computer-controlled gas centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant. The virus reportedly caused hundreds of the centrifuges to self-destruct.

As one of the closest military allies of the US, Canadian cyber warfare units would undeniably be on the front lines in a war between Washington and its current main rivals, Russia and China.

While levelling accusations of cyber espionage against its rivals, the Pentagon established its own Cyber Command in 2010 for the express purpose of carrying out cyberwar against them.

As for the claims that Canada’s cyberwar capabilities are defence-oriented and inadequate, nothing could be further from the truth.

CSE has been integrated with the NSA for decades, playing a critical role in eavesdropping on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, CSE boasted of its role in providing crucial military intelligence to the CAF.

More recently, CSE was exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a main auxiliary of the NSA in spying on foreign governments. Through the agency’s LANDMARK software, CSE can hack thousands of foreign computers in a matter of hours and remain essentially untraceable.

In 2013, it was revealed that CSE established covert off-shore sites at the request of the NSA to conduct surveillance on at least 20 “high-priority” countries. Among the foreign governments surveilled were Brazil, over its disputes with Canadian corporations, and Kenya, in which a cellphone network was infiltrated at the request of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy agency.

Former NSA executive Thomas Drake summed up one of the reasons CSE is a valued NSA partner: “Think of certain foreign agreements or relationships that Canada actually enjoys that the United States doesn’t, and under the cover of those relationships, guess what you can conduct?”

Also being planned is deeper integration of CSE, CSIS, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the CAF. Under a five-year plan initiated in 2013, these four entities are to be brought under the umbrella of the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC), the CAF’s central command and control hub. CJOC directs both domestic and foreign missions, and is involved in cyber support for all three branches of the military.

German government plans massive expansion of spy services

Sven Heymann

The German government is planning to massively expand its intelligence agencies. Funding for the Federal Agency for Constitutional Protection (BfV) is to increase by 18 percent in the coming year, while the foreign intelligence service (BND) will receive a 12 percent rise. This was revealed by the research of public broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitungdaily.

The expansion of the German intelligence agencies is part of a major buildup of the state apparatus at home and abroad. According to interior minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democratic Union), 7,000 new positions are to be created at the federal police alone between 2016 and 2020. During his speech on the budget debate last Tuesday in the parliament (Bundestag), Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble announced, in addition to increases to the defence budget, a “significant increase in spending on internal security, up to €2.2 billion more than in the previous financial plan.”

This buildup is officially justified with reference to security deficits and gaps in the struggle against terrorism. In fact, the goal of these comprehensive measures is the most wide-ranging surveillance of the population possible and the construction of a police state.

Under conditions of increased opposition to the war drive of the major parties, growing social inequality and the sustained economic crisis, the ruling elite is making conscious preparations for the outbreak of open class struggle.

Secret budgetary documents obtained by the Süddeutsche Zeitung make clear the extent of the domestic security buildup. The BfV will receive a funding increase in the coming year of €45 million. With a budget of €307 million, this amounts to an 18 percent increase in just one year.

The BND is also to be strengthened significantly. Its budget will increase by 12 percent to €808 million, as the newspaper reported. This corresponds to an increase of some €86 million.

Among other things, the BND is planning to intercept, filter and process so-called non-standard communications. This will include messenger services like Whatsapp, which have increasingly replaced text messages in recent years. According to a Focus magazine article from February this year, more than a billion people around the world now use Whatsapp, sending more than 42 billion messages daily.

BND’s “Project Panos” is to be employed to crack the partially encrypted messages. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, the BND can currently read only 10 of the 70 messenger services used worldwide. To end this, €21.5 million has been set aside in the budget. According to the report, the BND is not only concerned with metadata, but also the content of the chat messages exchanged. If required, external firms could be contracted to carry out the decoding.

A programme called “Zerberus” is to help the BND intercept discussions on satellite telephone. The tapping of cables at key domestic data points is also to be stepped up, as Tagesschau.de reported. In addition, a further €55 million has been made available for the “essential technical modernisation” of the BND.

The BfV’s concrete plans are not detailed in the secret documents. Nonetheless, the direction of the BfV is more than clear. The domestic intelligence service has significantly higher levels of staff than in the past, adding 470 positions already this year, and a further 100 are planned for 2017. The BfV has thus grown rapidly over recent years. If the budget is approved, the BfV’s budget will have trebled since 2000, Tagesschau.de pointed out.

The additional resources have been aimed at deepening ties between the federal agencies and the internal security agencies in the states. In this context, the BfV is to move “in the medium term into the role of a central agency” for the state surveillance agencies, it was stated. In addition, the databases of the BfV are to be linked with those of the central register of foreign nationals (AZR). Cyberdefence is also to be strengthened.

The spying on the population is not only to be conducted via electronic means. For the expenses and paying of informants, the BfV has made available €2.8 million.

The strengthening of the domestic intelligence agency also has an important foreign policy component. The BfV has been to date heavily dependent on cooperation with the US intelligence agency NSA, including the use of its XKeyScore software, as the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed in 2013. The current developments, according to Tagesschau.de, point “to an emancipation from the US agencies. In the longer term, the German agencies are clearly planning to be capable of operating more independently.”

The Left Party and Greens support the construction of a police and surveillance state. Any critique of the government’s plans to strengthen the state apparatus comes from the right.

“It was actually the opposition that demanded more police,” said Dietmar Bartsch, the co-chair of the Left Party’s parliamentary group, as he sought to claim credit for de Maizière’s initiative. At the same time, he accused the grand coalition in parliament of being “responsible for a failed policy of personnel and budget cuts.” They had made the police a “victim of austerity” and, since 1998, “eliminated 17,000 police jobs.” What was necessary was “a state capable of action,” and that included “well-equipped and well-trained people in the public service, particularly in the police.”

Turbulence returns to financial markets

Nick Beams

Volatility is returning to global bond and equity markets amid growing concerns over how much longer the flood of cheap money from the US Fed and other major central banks can continue to fuel their rise.

Last Friday, the Dow Jones index fell by almost 400 points following the European Central Bank decision the previous day not to further lower it base interest rates and its silence on whether to extend its quantitative easing program, which has already seen €1 trillion injected into financial markets, beyond March 2017.

Even more significant than the slide on the share markets was the shift in bond markets as yields began to rise and their price fell (the two bear an inverse relationship to each other).

Over the past year the flood of cheap money into financial markets, coupled with the lowering of interest rates, has seen the creation of a massive bubble such that $13 trillion worth of government bonds are now trading at negative yields. This means that their price is so high that an investor purchasing a bond and holding it maturity would make a loss.

This phenomenon means that the international market has been turned into a giant casino in which bonds are purchased on the basis that their price will rise still further and speculators will be able to make capital gains. However, if prices fall and yields begin to increase, they will incur significant losses.

That was in evidence on Friday. The yield on the US 10-year treasury bonds rose to 1.67 percent compared to a low its low of 1.46 percent it had reached several weeks earlier. In the past few days, the yield has increased by 0.15 percentage points, a significant movement. In Europe, yields on some German bonds, which had been negative, moved into positive territory for the first time in several months.

Another factor in Friday’s share market slide was remarks from members of the Fed’s open market committee that sets its base rate indicating they were in favour of an increase. Consequently all eyes on Monday were focused on a speech by Federal Reserve governor, Lael Brainard, a voting member of the open market committee. Brainard is considered to be a “dove,” that is, favouring a cautious approach on lifting rates, and so a turn by her would have almost certainly have sent the markets falling.

In the event, Brainard stuck to her previous line and the markets got the comment they wanted to hear, with the Dow Jones up by 239 points and recovering more than half of its losses on Friday. After reviewing the economic and financial situation and deflationary pressures in Europe and Asia Brainard said: “Today’s new normal counsels prudence in the removal of policy accommodation.”

Immediately after her comment, the futures market priced in a 15 percent chance of a rate rise when the Fed next meets on September 21, down from 24 percent two days earlier.

Significantly, the yield on bonds did not fall. One reason may have been a prediction by Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest bond market traders, that prices could fall further, with yields rising to 2 percent by the beginning of 2017. A rapid increase implies major losses for speculators who have gambled on their continuing decline as a result of central banks policies.

Apart from its immediate impact on the share market, Brainard’s speech was significant because of the picture it painted of the US and global economy and the growing perplexity at the top levels of the financial establishment over what to do next in view of the evident failure of the policies adopted since the financial crash of 2008 to end what is being recognised as ongoing stagnation.

Dealing with a series of interrelated phenomena, dubbed the “new normal”—other observers, such as former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, point to “secular stagnation”—she began by noting that a “sustained period” of undershooting the Fed’s inflation target of 2 percent could not be ruled out “along with global deflationary pressures that are weighing on inflation expectations.”

Labor market slack on the US had been greater than anticipated, she said, pointing to the lower participation rate in the labour force, which could be an expression of the “very slow recovery in job opportunities and wages.”

Financial transmission from foreign markets was strong and the disinflationary pressures and weak demand from abroad “will likely weigh on the US outlook for some time to come,” with “fragility” in global markets poising risks for the American economy.

Japan remained “greatly challenged” by weak growth and low inflation as is Europe and the experience from these economies highlighted the risk of becoming trapped in a “low-growth, low-inflation” environment. “Downside risks” were also present in emerging markets and growth in China was slowing.

Turning to the US economy, Brainard said it has been becoming increasingly clear that the so-called neutral rate of interest—the rate which neither stimulates the economy nor depresses it—remained “considerably and persistently lower than it was before the crisis.”

Highlighting the shift that has taken place, she said given the underlying relationships that prevailed at the time it would have seemed inconceivable ten years ago that with the Fed rate at or near zero, growth and inflation could have remained as low as they have.

One of the factors contributing to lower growth, and hence a fall in the neutral rate, is the sharp fall in productivity growth. In the years from 1950 to 2000 productivity, Brainard noted, had risen at an annual average rate of 2.5 percent. In the past five years it had only increased on average at a rate of 0.5 percent.

Brainard concluded her remarks with a discussion of policy options. Under the “new normal,” with interest rates near zero and likely to return there because of the lower neutral rate, the measures available to the Fed, were asymmetric. In other words, while the Fed can use interest rates to lower demand, they cannot be employed to lift it.

Neither Brainard nor any other members of the financial establishment have any alternative economic or financial measures to counter the present situation and so are continuing to fuel financial markets with cheap money, even as they know that this will create the conditions for ever greater turbulence and potentially another crisis.

Hunger and the social catastrophe facing America’s youth

Kate Randall

Two reports released this week cast a sharp light on the social catastrophe in the United States and its impact on America’s youth.

“Impossible Choices: Teens and Food Insecurity in America” (Urban Institute) and “Bringing Teens to the Table: A Focus on Food Insecurity in America” (Feeding America), both based on joint research conducted by the two organizations, detail the widespread hunger and the catastrophic choices young people are making in an effort to feed themselves, their families and their friends.

In 2015, 12.7 percent of US households were food insecure, meaning they had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. Among these 40 million people struggling to have enough to eat in America are an estimated 6.8 million young people ages 10 to 17, including 2.9 million who have very low food security, according to one food insecurity expert.

The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.

Researchers conducting the study spoke to teenagers in 10 focus groups in low-income communities throughout the country over the course of three years. The young people researchers spoke to—of varying races and backgrounds—live in communities where jobs are scarce, and those jobs available pay low wages, offer inadequate hours, or require skills that the teens’ parents do not have.

Due to decades of cuts in social programs and the lingering impact of the Great Recession, many parents struggling to feed their families begin running out of food by the middle of the month. Under these circumstances, teenagers, especially those with younger siblings, feel a responsibility to help out. “I will go without a meal if that’s the case,” a teenager interviewed in Chicago said. “As long as my two [younger] siblings [are] good, that’s all that really matters.”

Many of these families face a perfect storm of food insecurity. Grocery stores selling affordable, nutritious food are scarce, and the cost and time of traveling to better stores is prohibitive. Teens must often settle for food at local fast-food restaurants, drug stores, gas stations and convenience stores. “When you’re broke, you get the dollar menu,” said a boy from San Diego.

Some food insecure teenagers look for work in order to contribute to the family food budget, but find they must compete with adults for a limited number of low-skill, low-paying jobs at fast-food restaurants or in retail. It is when these possibilities do not pan out that some teenagers turn in desperation to make money “outside of the legal economy,” according to the researchers.

Food-insecure teenage boys interviewed reported stealing and selling drugs as one strategy for earning money to pay for food and other necessities, subjecting them and others to personal and legal risks. “Drugs, alcohol, everything,” said a teenage girl in rural Oregon. “Bad things people used to just do in high school has spread to the junior high and down to the elementary school.”

Food insecure teens, and girls in particular, are vulnerable to another type of insidious risk: sexual exploitation. Teens in all of the study’s locations spoke of girls having sex for money to pay for food and other needs.

This often takes the form of “transactional dating,” in which the teen regularly sees and has sex with someone, usually an older man, in exchange for food, meals, cash or other material goods. “It’s really like selling yourself,” said a teenage girl in Portland, Oregon. “You’ll do whatever you need to do to get money or eat.”

A smaller number of teens resort to the strategy of purposefully getting arrested to ensure continued access to food—in prison.

Drug dealing, stealing, voluntary incarceration, sexual exploitation—these are the “choices” significant numbers of teenagers in America are undertaking out of the material need to put food on the table for themselves and their families. This tragic reality for the generation born in the new century speaks volumes about the violent and socially unequal state of class relations in America in 2016.

In a rational world one would expect banner headlines and a national debate on strategies to combat hunger among young people. But in the current political climate, dominated by the election contest of the two big business parties, it has received scant attention. There is no mention of this crisis by the Clinton and Trump camps, where the social catastrophe confronting the working class in 21st century America is routinely ignored. Nor is there particular concern for horrific circumstances poor girls are forced into from the upper middle class practitioners of identity politics around the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the catastrophic state of social life in the United States—of which the two reports published this week are only a partial snapshot—is the outcome of decades of social counter-revolution carried out by both big business parties. The Clintons bear particular responsibility, as it was the administration of Bill Clinton that gutted the welfare system in the US and ensured a vast increase in poverty and hunger as a consequence.

As for Obama—who has repeatedly proclaimed that life is “pretty darn great” in America—his administration has overseen $8.6 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), the food stamp program. A report earlier this year predicted that 1 million people across the US could lose their benefits in 2016 due to the work requirements for SNAP included as part of the Clinton administration’s welfare “reform.”

Working families are told that there is “no money” to extend food assistance. Rather these and other social programs must be slashed to fund the Pentagon’s war budget, as the US government-military apparatus prepares new wars. Whatever individual occupies the White House following next January, he or she will be dedicated to imposing even deeper social cuts and austerity.

A society should be measured by the health and welfare of its most vulnerable citizens, particularly the young. Children and teenagers in a just society should be nurtured by having nutritious food in adequate supply, a decent roof over their heads, quality education, and the opportunities to explore the arts, sports and other interests as they prepare for their place in the workforce. These are inalienable social rights that should be guaranteed.

While the media and the political establishment choose to ignore this latest study on food insecurity and the suffering and perils it poses to American teenagers, workers and young people need to recognize it as a particularly noxious sign of the outmoded and barbaric capitalist profit system.

ISIS Fighter Reveals Group’s Plan If Defeated in Syria

Patrick Cockburn

Isis will flourish and survive even if it is defeated in the present battle for Syria and Iraq an Isis militant has told The Independent. In an exclusive interview, Faraj, a 30-year-old veteran fighter from north east Syria, says that “when we say that the Islamic State [Isis] is everlasting and expanding, it is not a mere poetic or propaganda phrase”. He says the group intends to rebuild its strength in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, adding that “Isis has sleeper agents all over the world and their numbers are increasing”.

In his account of his life in Isis, Faraj makes plain that only a year after the caliphate was declared in the wake of the capture of Mosul in 2014, its leaders could foresee that it might be overrun militarily. He reveals hitherto unknown details of the apparent close cooperation between Isis and Turkey and the degree to which foreign fighters who flooded into Syria to fight for Isis alienated local people from the movement by ordering them about and interfering in their lives.

Speaking through WhatsApp from outside Syria and asking for his real name to be concealed, Faraj says that when he first heard “from my emirs [commanders] that Isis would win even if it had been defeated militarily in Iraq and Syria, I thought they were just energising and encouraging us or they were just hiding their defeats.” But he soon found out that Isis leaders were taking practical measures early on to set up bases elsewhere in the world. A Libyan commander told him over a year ago that he was returning to Libya “for a certain mission and would be back in two months.”

It is significant that as early as August 2015, when Isis was close to its maximum territorial expansion, after capturing Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in May, it was already preparing for defeat. Faraj says that the world powers underestimate its resilience because they do not understand the attractiveness of Isis and its ideology to those who find the status quo unacceptable. He says: “I, like my commanders and comrades, fight in reaction to the tyranny and injustice I had experienced before.”

Faraj comes originally from a Sunni Arab village between the cities of Hasaka and Qomishli in the predominantly Kurdish north east corner of Syria. He is better educated than most Isis members, having graduated from the Faculty of Education at Hasaka University. He joined Jabhat al-Nusra along with his extended family in 2012. Known as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra recently claimed to have cut any ties with al-Qaeda and rebranded as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. However, when Isis fighters entered Faraj’s village and offered the young men a choice of leaving or joining them, he opted to join Isis.

His eyewitness account of developments within Isis and, in particular, its relationship to Turkey are revealing because they do not come from an embittered former Isis member trying to distance himself from his past. He says he is no longer a fighter, after differences with Isis that he does not explain, but “I am still an Isis supporter because I strongly believe in the wisdom or purpose behind its existence”. Interestingly, he finds Isis attractive not so much because of its extreme religious ideology but as an effective and well-organised vehicle for protest. He says: “Isis is the best solution to correct the wrongdoings of the authoritarian regimes in the region.”

Speaking of the Turkish military intervention in Syria which began on 24 August, Faraj helps explain a mysterious development which took place at the time. As Turkish tanks and anti-Isis rebel Syrian units moved into the border town of Jarabulus on the Euphrates River, Isis appeared to know they were coming and made no attempt to resist them. This was in sharp contrast to the ferocious resistance put up by Isis fighters to defend the Isis-held town of Manbij a little further south from attack by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) whose fighting muscle comes from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Isis may have lost as many as 1,000 dead in ground fighting and US bombardment from the air.

It was reported at the time that Isis fighters had fallen back from Jarabulus towards their other stronghold in the area at al-Bab, but Faraj has another explanation. He says: “When the Turkish army entered Jarabulus, I talked to my friends who were there. Actually, Isis didn’t leave Jarabulus; they just shaved off their beards.”

He has compelling claims about the degree of complicity between Isis and Turkey a year earlier relating to the defence of Tal Abyad, another Isis-held crossing point between Turkey and Syria which was a particularly important supply route for Isis because it is 60 miles north of the Isis Syrian capital Raqqa.

In the summer of 2015, the YPG forces advancing from east and west with strong US air support caught Tal Abyad in a pincer movement, which made it difficult for Isis to defend the town. Faraj was part of a 150-strong Isis force resisting the YPG attack. “Turkey supported Isis a lot,” he recalls. “When I was in Tal Abyad in May, 2015, we received a lot of weapons and ammunition without any obstacles from the border guards.” This has long been an accusation by the Kurds, but this may be the first time that allegations of Turkish complicity with Isis during a battle has been confirmed by an Isis fighter taking part in it.

Turkish government officials have repeatedly denied any accusations of complicity in the actions of Isis, or that weapons are getting into the hands of the group via Turkey.

Faraj, as a Syrian Sunni Arab, is critical of both Turks and Syrian Kurds. He expresses dislike for the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but adds “he is much better than the Arab dictators”. At the same time, he holds Mr Erdogan “responsible for destroying Syria” by pursuing a conflict with the Kurds in Turkey that spread across the border into Syria and by “supporting Isis and pushing them into Syria”.

Defenders of Turkish actions argue that whatever tolerance for Isis by Turkey there may have been previously, the two have been at war over the last year. There have been repeated Isis attacks in Turkey, including one on Istanbul International Airport that left 42 dead and culminating in a suicide bombing of Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep on 20 August that killed 54, of whom 21 were children. But, despite Mr Erdogan’s anti-Isis rhetoric, the restrained reaction by Isis to the Turk invasion, of which it is the nominal target, suggests that the understanding between Isis and Turkey, so blatant in the past, may not be entirely dead.

Paradoxically, although Faraj has enthusiasm for the spread of Isis and its beliefs to foreign countries, he is very critical of the foreigner volunteers who came to Syria to fight for the self-declared Caliphate. He found these foreigners, including British, French and Turkish volunteers, surprisingly ignorant of Islam and local customs, often impelled by unhappy home lives or boredom, and only useful for propaganda and suicide attacks. Worse, their failings alienated Syrians who had previously supported Isis.

He says: “When Isis came, locals were happy and welcomed it. People believed that Isis will be their saviour, but psychologically and socially, they couldn’t accept foreign commanders in charge of their day-to-day lives. For instance, people in Raqqa complained when a Saudi emir used physical force to get a woman to wear a niqab. Any local will be annoyed when a stranger interferes in their life, not as a guest, but as a ruler who tells people to obey his orders. I was angry when a Tunisian man ordered me to go to the mosque and hit me on the back with a stick.”

Faraj finds some consolation in the thought that the behaviour of skilled but tough Turkish Kurd guerrilla commanders brought in by the YPG to give military advice to the Syrian Kurds in 2012-13 caused similar offence among local Syrian Kurds. The Turkish Kurd officers in charge of training had lived all their lives in military camps and “were harsh and had never experienced civilian life”. He suspects that Syrians supporting the government in Damascus react with similar hostility to being ordered about by their Russian and Iranian allies.

The war in northern Syria is very distinct from that in the rest of the country. Its main protagonists are Kurds, Arabs, Isis, the YPG and Turkey with only limited involvement by the government in Damascus. Faraj says that many Arabs in the area have joined Isis simply because they have been persecuted by the YPG. He cites as an example two cousins of his from the town of Tal Hamis on the Khabur river west of Hasakah who were killed fighting the YPG. Their houses in Tal Hamis were then confiscated by the YPG and the widows of the dead fighters were left with nothing “so their children join Isis to get revenge for their parents”.

This is the pattern all over Syria and Iraq. Protagonists may not love the side they are on, but at least it enables them to fight an enemy whom they fear and hate. He cites as an example one of his earlier commanders, a Kurdish emir named Abu Abbas al-Kurdistani, subsequently killed in battle, who had been imprisoned without trial and tortured in Iraqi Kurdistan for four years. Kurdistani said that Isis was ideal for himself because it was “the best option for oppressed people” and gave him “the opportunity to take revenge.” Nowhere in the interview does Faraj acknowledge the role that Isis atrocities have played, not just in Syria and Iraq but across the world, in creating a host of enemies for the movement who now encircle it and are threatening to overwhelm it.

The Value of False Expectations: Islamic State, Lone Wolf Attacks, and Australia

Binoy Kampmark

Australia’s distance from various centres of power has been called a tyranny. But flip that tyranny over, and you have an assortment of benefits for local development, the mighty laboratory that bred a middle class experiment supposedly egalitarian and oiled by principles of social justice.

These days, such distance is said to have been overcome, the effects of instant communication, rapid travel, and transport. People still think Australia might be somewhere in Europe, but that mistake does not get away from assumptions that a wandering finger on a globe would be able to land safely on Sydney or Melbourne.

Those imaginative creatures scribbling for Rumiyah, an Islamic State publication that combines wishful thinking with equally wishful views of the world, decided to shine a spotlight on Australia. Well done indeed. “Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror.”

This agitated language had been motivated, in part, by the death of Ezzit Raad, an Australian jailed in connection with the 2005 plot to blow up the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Raad left Australia with brother Majed in 2013, months after his release. Islamic State subsequently announced that Raad was killed in July in the Syrian city of Manbij or, as Rumiyah preferred, when “a piece of shrapnel struck him and tore his chest open.”

Childish exhortations to target “a land cloaked in darkness and corrupted by kufr, fornication and all forms of vice” follow in the heated note. “Kill them on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown and Bondi. Kill them at the MCG, the SCG, the Opera House, and even in their backyards.” Like many ideologues steering the wheel, the authors mistake hyperbolic desperation for substance. “Stab them, shoot them, poison them, and run them down with your vehicles.”

Such a piece might well have been dismissed as the fantastic meanderings of a mind not only addled but lazy. Islamic State is getting a battering in a territorial sense, losing ground in Syria and northern Iraq.

Much of this is pure non sequitur stuff – Islamic State is merely a manifestation of circumstance. Here today, replaced tomorrow by something similar. The entire hot-house of Middle Eastern politics needs to be disassembled before any genuine work can be done.

Incapable of creating and organising military units on a global scale, the frazzled ideologues have opted for recruitment on the cheap: words, words, words. Messages relayed globally to incite, to enrage, to even titillate. Draw them out of the rooms; turn couch potatoes into assault rifle bearing, virgin seeking converts.

In so doing, the security services of various countries are put in a bind. Ignore the rant, or hunker down for the inevitable rise of the crazies? The obvious equation of idiocy is that it takes one to know one, and the State apparatus is always going to supply credence where none should be given. To play the terrorist game, the line between mere reaction and becoming reactionary is a fine one indeed.

Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, deemed the message worthy of extensive public comment. Speaking in Laos, Turnbull’s prognostication was grim. “As Daesh comes under more and more pressure on the battlefield in Syria and in Iraq – as it is rolled back, as its territory is being taken back – it will resort to terrorist activities outside of the Middle East” (ABC News, Sep 7).

The gold dust here lay in the solitary attacker, that convenient confection of security studies. Australians, urged Turnbull, “have to be very alert to the actions of these lone actors – individuals who, as I’ve described in the national security statement last week, for a variety of reasons, may be radicalised.”

Others did not see that same urgency, let alone gravity. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews made little fuss about it, despite taking “every threat… very seriously.” The Victorian Police Chief Commissioner, Graham Ashton, noted that “the only new content is essentially a poem making reference to a number of Australian locations.” It had also been released in other languages (German, French, Indonesian) with threatened targets accordingly adjusted. What to make of it? Propaganda, he calmly, suggested.

Other outlets were similarly lukewarm about any impending calamity. The Sydney Morning Herald did not feel an increased sense of urgency, noting that “there has not been any chatter by counter-terrorism authorities.” Nor did staff at the Sydney Opera House.

The Turnbull government has already demonstrated that speculation is a far better milch cow in the making of security policy than evident threat. It promises police state measures, extensive detention periods for those convicted of terrorist charges (even the flimsier ones).

Assessing intelligence generally demands dull, hallucinatory free sobriety; the reactionary posture, all the hallucinatory visions needed. All it takes these days is a threatening word to change the world, to command attention. Forget the actual value of the evidence, the value, in other words, of action.

Press on the Dole: How Canada Pays to Shape the News

Yves Engler

Last Saturday the Ottawa Citizen published a feature titled “The story of ‘the Canadian vaccine’ that beat back Ebola”. According to the article, staff reporter Elizabeth Payne’s “research was supported by a travel grant from the International Development Research Centre.” The laudatory story concludes with Guinea’s former health minister thanking Canada “for the great service you have rendered to Guinea” and a man who received the Ebola vaccine showing “reporters a map of Canada that he had carved out of wood and displayed in his living room. ‘Because Canada saved my life.’”

A Crown Corporation that reports to Parliament through the foreign minister, the International Development Research Centre’s board is mostly appointed by the federal government. Unsurprisingly, the government-funded institution broadly aligns its positions with Canada’s international objectives.

IDRC funds various journalism initiatives and development journalism prizes. Canada’s aid agency has also doled out tens of millions of dollars on media initiatives over the years. The now defunct Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has funded a slew of journalism fellowships that generate aid-related stories, including a Canadian Newspaper Association fellowship to send journalists to Ecuador, Aga Khan Foundation Canada/Canadian Association of Journalists Fellowships for International Development Reporting, Canadian Association of Journalists/Jack Webster Foundation Fellowship. It also offered eight $6,000 fellowships annually for members of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, noted CIDA, “to report to the Canadian public on the realities lived in developing countries benefiting from Canadian public aid.”

Between 2005 and 2008 CIDA spent at least $47.5 million on the “promotion of development awareness.” According to a 2013 J–Source investigation titled “Some journalists and news organizations took government funding to produce work: is that a problem?”, more than $3.5 million went to articles, photos, film and radio reports about CIDA projects. Much of the government-funded reporting appeared in major media outlets. But, a CIDA spokesperson told J-Source, the aid agency “didn’t pay directly for journalists’ salaries” and only “supported media activities that had as goal the promotion of development awareness with the Canadian public.”

One journalist, Kim Brunhuber, received $13, 000 to produce “six television news pieces that highlight the contribution of Canadians to several unique development projects” to be shown on CTV outlets. While failing to say whether Brunhuber’s work appeared on the station, CTV spokesperson Rene Dupuis said another documentary it aired “clearly credited that the program had been produced with the support of the Government of Canada through CIDA.”

During the 2001–14 war in Afghanistan CIDA operated a number of media projects. A number of CIDA-backed NGOs sent journalists to Afghanistan and the aid agency had a contract with Montréal’s Le Devoir to “[remind] readers of the central role that Afghanistan plays in CIDA’s international assistance program.”

The military also paid for journalists to visit Afghanistan. Canadian Press envoy Jonathan Montpetit explained, “my understanding of these junkets is that Ottawa picked up the tab for the flight over as well as costs in-theatre, then basically gave the journos a highlight tour of what Canada was doing in Afghanistan.”

A number of commentators have highlighted the political impact of military sponsored trips, which date back decades. In Turning Around a Supertanker: media-military relations in Canada in the CNN age, Daniel Hurley writes, “correspondents were not likely to ask hard questions of people who were offering them free flights to Germany” to visit Canadian bases there. In his diary of the mid-1990s Somalia Commission of Inquiry, Peter Desbarats made a similar observation. “Some journalists, truly ignorant of military affairs, were happy to trade junkets overseas for glowing reports about Canada’s gallant peacekeepers.”

The various arms of Canadian foreign policy fund media initiatives they expect will portray their operations sympathetically. It’s one reason why Canadians overwhelmingly believe this country is a benevolent international actor even though Ottawa long advanced corporate interests and sided with the British and US empires.

Saudia Arabia: Can’t Pay Its Bills, Yet Funds War on Yemen

Robert Fisk 

Almost exactly a year after Salman bin Albdulaziz Al Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and head of the House of Saud, hurriedly left his millionaire’s mansion near Cannes with his 1,000 servants to continue his vacation in Morocco, the kingdom’s cash is not flowing so smoothly for the tens of thousands of sub-continental expatriates sweating away on his great building sites.

Almost unreported outside the Kingdom, the country’s big construction magnates – including that of the Binladen group – have not been paid by the Saudi government for major construction projects and a portion of the army of Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and other workers have received no wages, some of them for up to seven months.

Indian and Pakistani embassies approached the Saudi government, pleading that their workers should be paid. Economists who adopt the same lickspittle attitude towards the Saudi monarchy as the British Government, constantly point out that the authorities have been overwhelmed by the collapse of oil prices. They usually prefer not to mention something at which the rest of the world remains aghast: deputy crown prince and defence minister Mohamed bin Salman’s wasteful and hopeless war in Yemen. Since the king’s favourite son launched this preposterous campaign against the Houthis last year, supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni president against Shia Muslim rebels, aircraft flown by Saudi and Emirati pilots (aided by British technical “experts” on the ground) have bombed even more hospitals, clinics and medical warehouses than America has destroyed in Serbia and Afghanistan combined since 1999.

The result? A country with 16 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, whose Aramco oil company makes more than $1bn a day and now records a budget deficit of $100bn, cannot pay its bills. At first, the Yemen fiasco was called “Operation Decisive Storm”, which – once it proved the longest and least decisive Arab “storm” in the Middle East’s recent history – was changed to “Operation Restore Hope”. And the bombing went on, just as it did in the pre-“hope” “storm”, along with the help of the UK’s “experts”. No wonder the very same deputy crown prince Mohamed announced this year that state spending on salaries would be lowered, yet individual earnings would rise.

In Pakistan, whose soldiers make up a large number of the “Saudi” armed forces, there has been outrage, parliamentarians are asking why three Saudi companies have not paid salaries for eight months, refusing even to provide food for their employees. In some cases, the Pakistanis have paid their own nationals for food supplies.

In Saudi Arabia itself, the government seems unable to cope with the crisis. The Arab News says that 31,000 Saudi and other foreign workers have lodged complaints with the government’s labour ministry over unpaid wages. On one occasion, the Indian consulate and local Indian expatriates brought food to the workers so that their people should not starve. The overall figure that the government owes the construction companies owed may be billions of dollars.

Overtly xenophobic comments have emerged in the Saudi press. Writing in the Saudi Gazette, Abdulrtahman Saad Al-Araabi said: “Many expats hate us and are angry because we are a rich country. Some of them go so far as to say that we, Saudis, do not deserve these blessings and the money we have. That is the reason why some of them become violent when they do not get paid on time.”

Well, I suppose some people are paying a lot of cash to the Jabhat al-Nusra (recently re-named Jabhat Fateh al-Shamal-Nusrah) or Al-Qaeda or Isis lads out there in the line of fire in Syria.

Embassy staff from the Philippines, France and many countries in the Middle East, have raised the problems with the Saudi government. Typical of their responses has been that of Saudi Oger which said it had been “affected by current circumstances [sic] which resulted in some delays in delays in fulfilling our commitments to our employees”.

The Saudi government insisted the company paid its employees. Many of them, it should be added, are Lebanese whose Sunni Muslims come from the Sunni areas of Lebanon who traditionally vote for the Sunni leader’s son Saad.

An official of the company made the extraordinary statement that “the company’s situation is unstable due to the scrapping [sic] of many of its projects it was to execute,” Meanwhile, workers at United Seemac construction company are complaining they have not been paid for months – or even granted permission to leave the country. Some had apparently not been paid for more than a year and a half. Unlike the big companies such as Binladen and Oger, these men – and they are indeed mostly men – are consumed into the smaller employees. “All the attention is on the big companies – it’s easy to ignore us because we are not so many people.”

All in all, a dodgy scenario in our beloved monarchy-dictatorship, whose war against the Shia Houthis – and the Shia Hezbollah, the Shia/Alawite regime in Damascus and Iran – is unending. Wasn’t there an equally dodgy Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis a few years ago? No cash flow problems then. And what does “yamamah” mean in Arabic? “Dove”? Let us go no further.

9/11 Fifteen Years After: What Might Have Been

Farhang Jahanpour

Fifteen years ago on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists changed the course of history, and the consequences of what happened on that day are still very much with us, and are arguably even growing more complex and more dangerous.

On 11 September 2001, 19 young Arab militants affiliated to Al Qaeda who had received rudimentary flying instruction in the United States hijacked and flew two passenger aircraft at the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one at the Pentagon in Washington and another aircraft was allegedly also flying towards the White House or the Capitol but it was brought down before it reached its target.

Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed as the result of those terrorist outrages. In response, America launched the “War on Terror” that has killed upward of a million people, destroyed many Middle Eastern countries, ruined the lives of tens of millions, killed nearly 7,000 US troops and injured another 50,000, and has cost the United States a staggering six trillion dollars.

This was the first time in US history that the American mainland had been attacked after the British troops had set fire to the White House in 1814 during the war between the United States and England. Even during the Second World War the continental United States did not receive any direct attacks, and the closest that the Japanese got was to attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

Of course, during the past few decades there have been numerous terrorist attacks on the US and other targets, the most notable being the attack carried out by Timothy McVeigh on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured. McVeigh too had religious motivations for his attacks.

He was a religious fanatic and a follower of David Koresh, and he bombed the federal building on the anniversary of the destruction of the Branch Davidian camp in Waco by federal forces, as the result of which Koresh, 54 other adults and 21 children were burnt alive

One can think of the massacre of close to a million Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi and Rwanda. A Human Rights Watch analysis estimated that 77% of the Tutsi population of Rwanda was slaughtered in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

Apart from the initial slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of nearly 70% of the Palestinian population in 1948, we had the slaughter of as many as 3,500 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila Camps in Lebanon by the Christian Phalangists between the 15 and 16 September 1982, under the supervision of the invading Israeli forces led by Ariel Sharon.

However, the 9/11 attacks have assumed a significance far greater than all other terrorist acts in the world.

Most Americans believe that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were unprovoked and came out of the blue. However, a quick glance at the history of American military involvement in the Middle East shows that many Muslims in the Middle East had been on the receiving end of many violent American invasions and attacks.

To name just a few, during the First Persian Gulf War, (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed “Operation Desert Shield”, more than 100,000 sorties were flown dropping 88,500 tons of bombs, many against Iraqi targets not only in Kuwait but in Baghdad. Between 20,000 and 26,000 Iraqi military personnel were killed and 75,000 others were wounded, and there were at least 3,500 civilian fatalities from bombing.

Apart from the attack on a bunker in Amiriyah, causing the deaths of 408 Iraqi civilians who were in the shelter, there was the attack on the fleeing Iraqis between Kuwait and Basra (known as Highway of Death), when between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were hit and up to 10,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.

The U.S. soldiers who bombed Iraqi forces even after they had surrendered on the field of battle in Operation Desert Storm laughed about their actions, calling the strafing “a turkey shoot,” and likening it to “shooting fish in a barrel.” As one American officer put it: “It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen. And to see those tanks just ‘boom,’ and more stuff keeps spewing out of them … it’s wonderful.”

There was an earlier 9/11, namely the US-supported coup in Chile and the bombing of La Moneda on 11 September 1973. President Richard Nixon had ordered economic warfare against the elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, culminating in a military coup led by army chief, Augusto Pinochet. Tens of thousands of people were arrested during the coup, many hundreds were detained, questioned, tortured and in some cases murdered.

It is important to remember that the CIA played a significant role in the creation of the Mujahedin fighters, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. When Soviet forces attacked Afghanistan in December 1979, the United States and her regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, created, trained and armed the Mujahedin (Holy Warriors) to fight against Russian forces.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted for ten years with some 14.453 Soviet forces killed and tens of thousands wounded. Between one and a half and two million Afghans were also killed. There were two million internally displaced persons and another five million became refugees in Iran and Pakistan, and the country was devastated.

In addition to the Afghan Mujahedin, a large number of Muslim militants from neighboring Arab countries were also organized and sent to Afghanistan to join the fight against Soviet forces.

Osama bin Laden, a member of a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, became a prominent organizer and financier of those foreign volunteers, with enormous assistance from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and tacit support from the United States. Under the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”, from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahidin and “Afghan Arabs” through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence.

After the defeat and withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden turned his attention to the other superpower, the United States, with the aim of allegedly freeing Muslim lands from Western occupation. In a message issued on 23 February 1998, announcing his intention to fight against what he called “the crusader armies”, bin Laden complained: “…despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded one million… despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.”

Of course, what Osama bin Laden said was morally reprehensible. At the same time, many militant Muslims find some remarks by Western politicians equally worrisome and insensitive. For instance, when the then Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked on camera if the death of half a million Iraqi children as the result of the sanctions had been worth it, her response was an emphatic “it was worth it.”

The aim of referring to other atrocities apart from 9/11 is not to belittle its significance, but merely to point out that it was not the only terrorist or violent act in the course of recent history. It is also to point out that the “War on Terror” was not the best way of dealing with an event, which was merely a criminal act carried out by a few deranged fanatics.

After all, Osama bin Laden had said that one of his main aims was to lure American forces to wars in the Middle East so that they could bleed in the same way that Soviet forces had bled. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush fell into that trap.

Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford University, was criticized for anti-American remarks when he simply said: “If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.”

Had Osama bin Laden been treated as a violent criminal, and had he been tried and brought to justice instead of President Bush launching a “War on Terror”, he would have been exposed and condemned in the eyes of his supporters, millions of lives and trillions of dollars would have been saved and the world would not be facing the intensified scourge of terrorism that has been mainly an outcome of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, it is not possible to set the clock back, but we can only contemplate what could have been if a different course had been pursued, and also we can learn a lesson about the fight against terrorism in the future. After all, ideas, even distorted and extremist ideas, cannot be bombed away.

The only way to fight against them is to hold a dialogue, educate and enlighten the fanatics, and above all to hold fast to our principles. And most importantly, to understand why people become terrorists in the first place and do something about the reasons they do, if we can.

What will defeat the terrorists is adherence to law, freedom, democracy and a society that accommodates all the different voices.

As Mike Lofgren stated in his book The Deep State, ”The tangled, millennia-old story of Syria and Iraq or Afghanistan, or the complex ethnic hatreds of the Balkans vanish before a few sonorous phrases like ‘regime change,’ ‘responsibility to protect,’ or ‘humanitarian intervention.’ This mind-set leads to predictable disasters from which the political establishment never learns the appropriate lessons.”

If we wish to avoid further disasters we must learn the appropriate lessons from our mistakes.

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov dies

David Levine

Uzbekistan President Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov, one of the longest-standing ex-Soviet heads of state, died on Friday, September 2 at the age of 78. Under the constitution, Nigmatilla Yuldashev, head of the upper house of parliament, was to become the acting president until elections are held. However, on Thursday, Yuldashev declined to assume the office, allowing Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev to take over instead.

According to Russian media outlet IA Regnum, Yuldashev explained his decision to step down by saying that he “does not have sufficient experience in managing a state, and it would be better to consider the question of the candidacy of the country’s Prime Minister Mirziyoyev in the interests of the people.” A unanimous vote of both houses of parliament approved Mirziyoyev’s appointment, and members of all parliamentary political parties spoke out in favor of him.

Elections are to be held within three months. A Facebook page on the election campaign indicates three candidates: Mirziyoyev, Yuldashev, and Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov.

Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, borders on Afghanistan and is located between China and the Caspian Sea. The Central Asia–China gas pipeline, which supplies China from Turkmenistan, passes through it. Because of its geostrategic location, the country also has the potential, if the necessary infrastructure is built, to supply gas to Europe and thereby reduce the region’s dependence on Russian supplies.

On September 2, both US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued statements on Karimov’s death. Obama’s remarks conspicuously lack the word “condolences” or any other vocabulary ordinarily associated with mourning, instead asserting that the “United States reaffirms its support for the people of Uzbekistan.”

United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia Daniel Rosenblum visited Uzbekistan on September 5, but, according to press reports, met only with his counterparts at the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev attended Karimov’s funeral on Saturday. Putin went to Samarkand and laid a bouquet of roses on the dead autocrat’s grave on September 6. While there, he met with Mirziyoyev, prior to the announcement of Mirziyoyev’s appointment as president.

Karimov was an emblematic representative of the corrupt Soviet bureaucracy, which utilized its position during the restoration of capitalism to acquire vast power and privileges in the post-Soviet world. Presiding over an impoverished society in which the World Bank estimated in 2010 that less than half of the working-age population was employed, Karimov maintained his rule with the use of brute force and by maneuvering between the United States and Russia.

Having begun his career as a design engineer, he eventually became an economic policy bureaucrat, serving as the republic’s finance minister in 1983, chairman of the Uzbek state planning agency in 1986, and First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party Central Committee in 1989.

In 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR elected Karimov as its first President. After initially speaking out against the proposed dissolution of the Soviet Union, in August 1991 he declared Uzbek independence. Soon afterwards, the Uzbekistan Communist Party broke away from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and reestablished itself as the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, of which Karimov became chairman.

Shortly thereafter he vastly expanded Uzbekistan’s security services, as part of the consolidation of his political power. Having pardoned a whole number of Uzbek officials convicted of corruption in the 1980s, he was able to solidify his relations with powerful regional clans that function as a sort of unofficial aristocracy in the country.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 and the holding of national elections three days later, Karimov worked to destroy his political opponents. On January 16, he ordered security forces to fire upon an opposition demonstration called in support of Karimov’s rival in the recent elections, the poet Muhammad Salih. Since then, the Uzbekistan government has prevented the emergence of any lawful challenger, although there remain powerful local clans as well as religious organizations in the country that have a long and complicated history of relations with the government. Over the course of his rule, Karimov was reelected on numerous occasions with super-majorities in elections determined to be undemocratic by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

In 2001, Karimov became a key participant in Washington’s “War on Terror.” His ongoing campaign against Islamic fundamentalism in Uzbekistan was the basis of a budding relationship between his government and the White House. A permanent United States military base, which was used for operations in neighboring Afghanistan, was established in Karshi-Khanabad. It hosted over 1,500 US troops.

In 2005, however, Karimov executed a turn in Uzbekistan’s foreign policy. In May of that year, a protest erupted in the city of Andijan, located in the country’s east. The government squelched the demonstration with violence, resulting in deaths ranging in estimate from 187 to 1,500. Initially blaming the unrest on Islamic fundamentalists, Tashkent identified a relationship between the Andijan protests and the US-sponsored “color revolutions” that had recently brought down governments in Georgia, Ukraine, and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Shifting its orientation more towards Moscow, Karimov’s government demanded that the US close its base in Karshi-Khanabad within 180 days. Uzbekistan expanded its participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), established by Russia, China, and four of the Central Asian states in 2001. The country also expanded its economic ties with Russia, including the signing of deals with Russian energy giants Gazprom and Lukoil for the development of oil and gas reserves located on the Ustyurt Plateau.

In January 2006, Uzbekistan became a member of the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC), a regional organization of ex-Soviet states aimed at economic integration, in which Russia played the leading role. In June of the same year, the country rejoined the Russia-dominated military alliance of post-Soviet states, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which it had left in 1999.

In response, Western governments and their supporters intensified their hypocritical denunciations of human rights violations in Uzbekistan. The European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on the country.

Despite the Uzbekistan government’s efforts to restrict public access to information, reports by Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights Council, and other nongovernmental organizations have exposed systematic torture by police and security forces in Uzbekistan, the virtual ban on oppositional political organizations, official and unofficial media censorship, restrictions on religious freedoms, harassment and intimidation of human rights activists, child labor, and compulsory labor. According to the reports, all of this was going on long before 2005—that is, when Tashkent was in alliance with Washington.

With the election of US President Obama and the partial lifting of EU sanctions in autumn 2008, Karimov rebalanced his foreign policy orientation back toward the United States. Uzbekistan left the EAEC and once again became a transit point for NATO materiel into Afghanistan. Karimov refused to ratify the treaty establishing the CSTO’s Collective Rapid Reaction Forces in June 2009, and the country left the CSTO a second time in 2012.

Still, the United States has yet to reestablish a military base in Uzbekistan. Nor did Karimov’s government support the ongoing US-led information and economic war against Russia. As a new leadership takes shape, that government’s attitude toward the US-Russia standoff will attract heightened attention.