Afghan Security Forces and the Survival of the Afghan State

Rohullah Naderi

One thing is certain. Coalition forces led by the U.S. won’t stay in Afghanistan “forever.” The question is with their withdrawal from Afghanistan, can Afghan Security Forces (ASF) hold the Afghan State together and protect its borders? I am sure this question is haunting Afghan leadership, the Afghan people and the youth of the country who have lived in a “relatively” stable Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era. This question is even more important for the foreign backers of the Afghan government and ASF. After many years of support and training by coalition forces, it is time to look at the preparedness, moral integrity, professionalism and morale of the ASF and evaluate if they are up for the job of protecting the Afghan State and its people.

According to the Pentagon, the war in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $45 billion per year. This cost has come down from its peak of $100 billion in 2010. From 2010 to 2012, there were approximately 100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan. More money was needed to financially sustain the troop level. Out of $45 billion that is now spent on the war in Afghanistan, $5 billion of it exclusively goes to ASF. The money is mainly used for their training and salaries. The idea of training ASF to shoulder the challenges of security and fight insurgency along with coalition forces took precedence around 2008. Prior to that, the subject of developing the Afghan army was not on the agenda. According to John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in the early years of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-02, the U.S. and its partners “focused solely on US military operations and did not include the development of an Afghan army, police, or supporting ministerial-level institutions.” Mr. Sopko further states that it was after 2008 that NATO forces put together a functional training and capacity-building program that could help the Afghan army become professional.

Up until the end of 2017, the U.S. has spent $70 billion building and training ASF. In spite of this heavy financial investment, ASF is a mess. Strength-wise, it is nowhere near the goal of reaching 352,000 troops. In fact, SIGAR said in its 2016 report, that “neither the U.S. nor its Afghan allies truly know how many Afghan soldiers and police are available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operation capabilities.” In the same year, the Associated Press reported about the presence of “ghost soldiers” that have seriously undermined the fight against the Taliban insurgency and revealed the prevalence of corruption in the army’s rank and file. Ghost soldiers receive salaries but are physically absent from the battlegrounds. They only exist on paper. Their number apparently runs into the tens of thousands. The problem of ghost soldiers is coupled with a high desertion rate. There are multiple reasons for leaving the force. It can range from inconsistency in payment of salary, poor leadership, lack of on-time reinforcements, poor living conditions, corruption, nepotism, the absence of equipment and military gear and fear of insurgent groups. The issue of desertion is serious. It is usually tackled through recruitment drives by army’s top brass, but this strategy is unsustainable. The factors that lead to desertion should be addressed. In terms of time and resources, it is much more profitable to keep a trained soldier than start from scratch by training a new recruit.

The problems of ASF are not just limited to ghost soldiers and a high desertion rate. Illiteracy is hampering its development and professionalism. In 2009, SIGAR reported that only “13 percent” of ASF recruits were literate. Illiteracy which is a broader problem of the Afghan population, can be a hindrance for ASF as it negatively impacts their training process. Most of the military training manuals are in written forms, hence, one needs literacy to comprehend and utilize them. Lack of literacy will lead to incomplete training, slow training frustrating both trainees and trainers, overutilization of resources and ultimately desertion. To make matters worse, the language barrier that comes with foreign trainers is a further hindrance in the training process. On the operational level, illiteracy is an obvious barrier, too. SIGAR’s 2017 report laments this difficulty. A soldier should be able to read and understand maps, signs, directions and follow instructions to carry out orders for the purpose of being part of the battle force. This is the way a battle is fought and won. Illiteracy affects preparedness for the battlefield. It disturbs all levels of the Afghan defense apparatus and chain of command, creating an endless confusion and incomprehension in conflict situations. The prospect of an illiterate or semi-literate army defending Afghanistan’s borders after the withdrawal of foreign forces seems hopeless. And the use of drugs in the army is rampant too. In a country that cultivates poppy in large quantity, drug use seeps into every institution. The prospect of an army addicted to an opioid creates obvious problems in combat situations.

ASF has long been plagued by endemic corruption. This is one of the challenges that can result in an implosion from within if the issue is not dealt with effectively. Corruption in ASF takes many forms and occurs on different levels. SIGAR in its 2017 report detailed all forms of corruption, which include extortion by Afghan national police – triggering anger from the public, the stealing of salaries and theft, and the sale of supplies such as fuel and weapons. Sometimes the weapons end up in the hands of the Taliban. Undoubtedly, corruption happens in ASF, but it is also incentivized by the significant pouring of money by the West into the Afghan defense department, without setting up a “transparency mechanism” to ensure accountability. Afghanistan was a devastated country gripped into a deep poverty with a voracious hunger for wealth. But the Western donors had the responsibility and mandate to be cautious that their taxpayers’ money is spent productively and toward an end with a clear outcome. Afghans did not have reputed and functional institutions to make use of the money responsibly. They did not have the required human and institutional capacity to manage such large sums of money. Money was just thrown into a bottomless pit “hoping” to build an army. The West should know better than anyone that hope is never a “strategy.”

When it comes to professionalism and fighting spirit of ASF, the story is even starker. The major turnaround that spotlighted the lack of professionalism and morale of ASF was the fall of Kunduz province in 2015. Personally, it was a shocker to me. The first question that flashed through my mind was: where did all the investment and training go? Even though the fall of Kunduz was brief, symbolically, it was significant. The Taliban used it as a propaganda stunt to display their power, sending a message that they have the power to overrun a major city. The fall showcased the flaws in ASF’s strategy and training. The fact-finding mission headed by former intelligence chief, Amruallah Saleh, to investigate the reasons that led to the fall of Kunduz pinpointed “poor leadership, lack of coordination, misused of resources and bad communication.” Nothing drastic was done by the Americans – the financial sponsors of ASF, nor Afghan leadership to address those flaws or the other challenges faced by ASF, though half-measure steps were taken to improve the situation. In a “blame the messenger” approach to deflecting the problem, the report by Saleh itself became controversial among Afghan officials in light of its indictment of ASF.

Every time you switch on any local TV station in Afghanistan, there is endless talk of ASF training by Americans and NATO forces and how every major donor country is pledging more money and resources toward that end. But it is just media hype. The ground realities are quite different, as the fall of Kunduz amply showed.

Fundamentally, it would be unwise to expect a paradigm shift from Americans as state building is not on their agenda. The U.S. is driven in large part by short-termism via the plundering of  whatever remains of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, and a preoccupation with experimenting their latest weapons on our lands. Leaving the Afghan defense apparatus forever dependent on the U.S. better serves the interests of American foreign policy. As partners, arms manufacturers and defense contractors will get more lucrative contracts from the Pentagon, if the war machine persists. Protracted war means continued profits for weapons manufacturers and defense contractors, but more death for Afghans – sport for some American soldiers – and an interminable draining of American taxpayers’ money. It is better not to talk about Afghan leadership and its Western-educated technocrats, who boast of reforms and economic self-sufficiency. In fact, it is their poor leadership that gets Afghan soldiers killed on the frontlines, as the fall of Kunduz demonstrated. The Afghan government led by neoliberal-cum-virulent racist Ashraf Ghani – installed by former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry – is busy indulging in brutal racism and pursuing the politics of exclusion. He is hell-bent to ensure his ethnic group, the Pashtuns, get the major say on policies and get the lion’s share of government resources. Other ethnic groups are left high and dry.

The original target of the Afghan government was to reach the mark of a 352,000-strong force. But in the process, quality was compromised. It is true that Afghanistan is an illiterate country, making it hard to recruit literate soldiers. So, instead of wasting resources and time on training and educating illiterate recruits, the focus should have been paid on relatively literate ones, and on promoting literacy more broadly within Afghan society. These options could have yielded higher returns. After all, having a “small” but well-trained, well-equipped, professional and educated force is better than a large illiterate army that takes a longer time to learn how to operate advanced weaponry and understand modern warfare. In the end, both the West and Afghan leadership missed the mark. And no correction course is taken to right the wrong despite repeated reports and warnings from SIGAR and other independent sources. But the most important point is ASF’s financial dependence on the West. How long can they depend on Americans and NATO forces for money? Nothing has been done to address this vital issue. Billions of dollars flooded into the country and ASF is still far from being financially independent. The biggest question: what kind of scenario are we looking at when Americans and NATO stop footing the bill? This is the question on which the survival of the Afghan State depends.

Chemical Weapons Hypocrisy

Robert Fisk

Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.

I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops’ raid on his lawyer’s office – there’s a Russian connection, all right.

And I’m not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.

I’m not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma – even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought she’d won his hand. What is this nonsense?

Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian “expansionism” – and no doubt arms sales to the Kingdom have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.

Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.

This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government – though I suspect, having seen Russia’s Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.

But we all know the problems of proof when it comes to chemicals and gas. Like depleted uranium – which we used to use in our munitions – it doesn’t, like a shell fragment or a bomb casing, leave a tell-tale hunk of metal with an address on it. When all this started with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified it as gas munitions manufactured in the Soviet Union – but sent to Libya, not to Syria.

But it’s a different war that I’m remembering today. It’s the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. When the Iranians re-crossed their own border and stormed into Iraq years later, Saddam used gas on thousands of Iranian soldiers – and civilians, for there were nurses and doctors at the war front.

Funny how we forget this now. We don’t talk about it. We have forgotten all about it. Talk about the “normalisation” of chemical warfare – this was it!

But in our desire to concentrate minds on Syria, we’re not mentioning the Iran gassings – Iran being another one of our present-day enemies, of course – and this may be because of our lack of official memory.

More likely it’s because of what happened: the institutionalisation of chemical warfare, the use of chemicals by Saddam who was then an ally of the West and of all the Gulf Sunni states, our frontline Sunni hero. The thousands of Iranian soldiers who were to die were referred to on Iraqi radio after they crossed the frontier. The “Persian insects” had crossed the border, it announced. And that’s how they were treated.

For the precursors for the Iraqi gas came largely from the United States – one from New Jersey –  and US military personnel later visited the battlefront without making any comments about the chemicals which were sold to the Iraqi regime, of course, for “agricultural” purposes. That’s how to deal with insects, is it not?

Yet not a soul today is mentioning this terrible war, which was fought with our total acquiescence. It’s almost an “exclusive” to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it. That was the real “normalisation”, and we allowed it to happen. Religious indeed, for it was the first great battle of the Sunni-Shia war of our time. But it was real.

Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, a few survivors were even sent to British hospitals for treatment. I travelled with others on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the railway compartments packed with unsmiling young men who coughed mucus and blood into white bandages as they read miniature Korans.

They had blisters on their skin and, horrifically, more blisters on top of the first blisters. I wrote a series of articles about this obscenity for The Times, which I then worked for. The Foreign Office later told my editors that my articles were “not helpful”.

No such discretion today. No fear of being out to get Saddam then – because in those days, of course, the good guys were using the chemicals. Don’t we remember the Kurds of Halabja who were gassed by Saddam, with gas which the CIA told its officers to claim was used by the Iranians?

For this war crime, Saddam should have been tried. He was indeed a “gas-killing animal”. But he was hanged for a smaller massacre with conventional weapons – because, I have always suspected, we didn’t want him exposing his gas warfare partners in an open court.

So there we are. May holds a “war cabinet”, for heaven’s sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.

What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages – about missiles that are “nice and new and ‘smart’” – are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US? We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.

This is a very bad moment in Middle East history – and, as usual, it is the Palestinians who will suffer, their own tragedy utterly forgotten amid this madness. So we are going to “war”, are we? And how do we get out of this war once we have started it? Any plans, anyone? What if there’s a gigantic screw-up, which wars do tend to usually produce? What happens then?

Well, I guess Russia comes to the rescue, just as it did for Obama when gas was used for the first time in the Syrian war.

Is India Fast Becoming A Dysfunctional Democracy?

Arshad M Khan

When hate invades the human mind, there is no limit to brutal atrocity.  On April 10, a  Guardian story showed a video in which there is cheering as an Israeli sniper shoots an unarmed Palestinian a considerable distance away.  Shown on TV in Israel, it has been the subject of some introspective debate.  Then there is news from Kashmir to make anyone, but the perpetrators and their supporters, cringe in horror.

Eight-year old Asifa Bano went in the afternoon to the nearby forest, as she usually did, to bring back the family horses from grazing.  She never returned.  Family and friends searched all-night by flashlights but could not find her.  Five days later her body was found.

“She had been tortured,”  recalls her mother.  “Her legs were broken … Her nails had turned black and there were blue and red marks on her arm and fingers.”

Was this the work of a demented sadist?  No, it turns out.  It was a planned operation intended to terrorize her community of Muslim nomads (Gujjars) to leave this predominantly Hindu area about 45 miles east of Jammu City.

According to investigators, Asifa was taken to a temple where she was held for several days.  The eight-year old was repeatedly “raped for days, tortured and then murdered,” states the charge sheet.  She was strangled to death, then hit twice on the head with a stone.

A retired government officer, Sanji Ram aged 60, calmly planned this horror, aided by police officers Anand Dutta, Tilak Raj, Sunder Verma, and someone called Khajuria.  The outrage over the incident has grown since two ministers from the ruling BJP (Mr. Modi’s party) attended a rally in support of the accused.

Terrorizing Muslims in Kashmir is not new; it has been ongoing for decades.  But terrorizing Muslims, Dalits, Christians and indigenous peoples in India itself has now also mushroomed.

Six Christian churches have been burned since 2015, and a concerted attempt to boycott Christian businesses is underway in the northeast.  The killing of Muslims and Dalits by vigilantes on minor pretexts continues as the country’s democracy turns into a ‘mobocracy’.

It is ‘Democracy a la’ Modi’, a phrase that is the title of a long essay by scholars Sumit Ganguly and Krishna Menon in The National Interest (Jan/Feb 2018) — the title was changed to ‘Making India Great Again?’ in the internet version.  Mr. Modi and his party want to turn India’s “kaleidoscope of languages, religions, castes and cultures” into a culturally Hindu state, even a religious return to Hinduism for they believe that “many Hindus were forcibly converted to, or duped into adopting Islam and Christianity.”  Forget the Islamic injunction against forced conversion or the abundant evidence of tireless Christian missionaries including Mother Teresa.

The National Volunteer Force or RSS in their white shirt, khaki shorts uniform conduct martial drills and “serves as the party’s force multiplier and base”.  It demonizes the other creating the environment for vigilante lynchings of minorities — overwhelmingly Muslim note the authors — to continue with impunity.

“Attacks on minority communities have become common, and academics, students and journalists who highlight the harassment and intimidation are subjected to public calumny, and have occasionally been killed.”

Thus noted Hinduism scholar and University of Chicago divinity professor Wendy Doniger’s book, “The Hindus:  An Alternative History,” which presented a ‘new way of understanding’ Hinduism according to the publisher was banned as vulgar following a Hindutva campaign.  Much worse can happen.  Gauri Lankesh, a prominent woman journalist and critic of Hindu nationalist policies was shot dead outside her home in Bangalore last September.  A list of Indian journalists killed is on Wikipedia.  By the way, no reason has been given by The National Interest as to why the original title of the Ganguly/Menon article has been altered on their website.  Of course the published magazine carries the original title.

It was an RSS man — they claimed he was no longer a member — who assassinated Gandhi for his defense of minorities.  Mr. Modi joined the RSS in 1971 rising to become its National General Secretary.

Such is India today.

Spanish government promotes militarism in schools

Alejandro López

Spain’s Popular Party (PP) government has designed a new syllabus for 6-to-12-year-old schoolchildren, “Social Values and Ethical Values,” which promotes militarism and Spanish nationalism.  The syllabus has been designed by the Ministry of Education National Centre for Innovation and Educational Research (CNIIE) and the Ministry of Defence Security and Defense Coordination and Studies Division.

The reactionary content is evident in the leaked 245-page draft syllabus, which is composed of 10 teaching units, including the need to respect the army, the police, the flag, the anthem and the King and to uphold the unity of Spain.

The Socialist Party (PSOE) and the pseudo-left Podemos organisation are fully behind the PP’s approach, disagreeing only on the way it is presented.

In a debate in the Spanish Senate this week, PSOE senator Begoña Nasarre declared, “The youngest have the right to know what their armed forces are, a fundamental part of the security and protection of the country and the exercise of our rights and freedoms.” She criticized the PP because it had removed the “Education for Citizenship” topic from the school curriculum, which had been formulated “with participation from all areas and sectors… and maximum consensus.”

According to Europa Press, Podemos Senator Sara Vilà “has not questioned whether a defense culture should exist, but has disagreed about what should be taught in it and why it should exist. In her opinion, the main driver of this objective should be to explain in a ‘transparent’ way… what the Ministry of Defence does with public money.”

Vilà declared that “society will never be close to the military” while it continues to be “an opaque, closed space, with a parallel justice system and without the right to organize or freedom of expression.”

In the new syllabus, teachers will have to “explain to the students how national defence is the responsibility not only of the armed forces,” but that Article 30 of the Spanish Constitution states that all Spaniards have “the right and duty to defend Spain.”

Children will have to learn the anthem of the armed forces and its different divisions (land, sea and air), create publicity posters for the National Day parade, and make pins showing the Spanish flag.

In one of the computer games created for classroom use, the children will extinguish a fire with help from the Military Emergencies Unit (a branch of the Spanish army responsible for providing disaster relief), which will end with a video saying, “They are a public service in the service of Spain.” In another game, children will design cards to show through drawings and phrases “how they as citizens can help national defence.”

Another activity will focus on building teamwork and military values, such as discipline and hierarchy. Children will solve a military-themed puzzle in which “all the pieces are important.” The different ways to enter the army will be explained by a video titled “There Are a Thousand Reasons to Join.”

Another game talks about the “real threats that affect Spain,” including terrorism, organized crime and “illegal” migration. In addition, it identifies the military as “the state’s fundamental tool for national defence.” In the game, children will simulate being soldiers “working for peace” and helping rebuild cities destroyed by war.

In an exercise called “We Want to be Soldiers,” children will be indoctrinated in Spartan values. They will be required to “fill out a form to verify that they meet the necessary requirements to be a good soldier: to be studying 1st or 2nd year of primary education, to exhibit good behaviour in class and not be punished by a teacher, to allocate time to study on a daily basis, to do physical exercise every day, and to respect companions and professors.” 

The syllabus continues: “Next, they will take a military card in which they fill in their information and cut out and paste a photograph; this will accredit them as an authentic soldier.”

Private and semi-private schools, which make up 32 percent of Spain’s education system, are also targeted. Minister of Defence María Dolores de Cospedal signed a memorandum of understanding with the Association of Private Teaching Centres so that their “teachers and students know the role of the army” and teach that the Armed Forces “are a good way to strengthen our nation.”

Teachers in private schools will be required to include courses taught by the Ministry of Defence, and schoolchildren will be taken to military facilities such as museums or barracks to see “first-hand the work of the army and the navy.”

Ironically, the announcement of the new syllabus comes amid a massive campaign spearheaded by the main political parties and the Madrid-based press accusing the Catalan education system of indoctrinating children in Catalan secessionism and nationalism.

Such militarist indoctrination in the guise of education is not to Spain. For nearly 40 years (1939-1978), children were indoctrinated in fascist values under the regime of General Francisco Franco, in the form of the compulsory subject called “Instruction in the National Spirit.” The course included lectures on “The Essence of Spanishness,” “Anti-Spanishness throughout History,” “The National Movement, an Effort to Recover Spanishness,” and “Spain’s Mission in the World.”

A student would encounter passages such as: “And what is Spain? It is a blessing from God;” “The state exerts its paternal action on all citizens so that they feel as happy as possible;” “If the citizens of a state are allowed to think however they want in politics, we will have social chaos instead of an organised people;” and “Spain is a totalitarian state: a single chief, a single command, a single obedience.”

Then as now, the Spanish ruling class aims to promote militarism as way of suppressing the class struggle, deflecting social tensions outward and projecting its imperialist ambitions. These objectives were spelled out very clearly in the recently updated National Security Strategy, which foresees the “uncertainty” of a world with “increased geopolitical tensions.”

The document argues that internally the ruling class faces major threats and challenges from secessionist movements as in Catalonia, as well as from an ageing population, rising inequality, a lack of “quality jobs” and high unemployment. Externally, the major threats include “oil dependency” from unstable sources, “new actors challenging the multilateral system [an unveiled reference to Russia and China], droughts, floods and forest fires” caused by climate change, economic protectionism, terrorism and cyber-attacks.

Beset by these threats, Spanish imperialism declares that “the following areas are of special interest for National Security: Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia-Pacific,” i.e., pretty much the whole world.

To realise its grandiose imperialist ambitions, Spain announced earlier this year that it will more than double its defence budget by 2024, from €8.7 billion to €18.47 billion.

The Strategic Plan of Grants of the Ministry of Defence, leaked to eldiario.org, explains very clearly the objectives of this campaign: to increase the sense of external threat, increase the percentage of the population that accepts foreign interventions by the Spanish army, supports Spain’s role in NATO and sees as “insufficient” the resources given to defence.

The new school syllabus is an attempt to promote “the culture of defence” and overcome the population’s traditional hostility to the army as a result of the crimes it perpetrated in its former colony in northern Morocco (1909-1927) and during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

More recently, in 2004, Popular Party Prime Minister José María Aznar was forced from office largely because of his support for the Iraq War, and his PSOE successor José Luis Zapatero was forced to withdraw Spain’s troops.

Targeting children for militarist propaganda is just the latest in a series of strategies rolled out by the ruling class. It has sought to counter anti-militarist sentiment by branding military intervention as humanitarian—in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Libya and Syria—with the aid of the Stalinists and pseudo-left groups. Resources have been made available for funding books, conferences and films glorifying the army and rehabilitating Francoism and legitimising its methods.

Beset by mass unemployment, poverty affecting a quarter of the population, and the growth of social opposition, the political establishment has no answer other than the “culture of defense.” This must be taken as a dire warning that the ruling elite will use the same methods it used in 1936 and is employing today in Catalonia against the entire working class.

Another Australian prime minister faces serious crisis

Mike Head

For the sixth time since 2007, an Australian prime minister faces the threat of possible removal, either by a landslide electoral defeat or a backroom coup. Internal divisions are shaking the Liberal-National Coalition government, with key cabinet ministers publicly jockeying to replace Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, Treasurer Scott Morrison and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, each told media outlets on Monday they aspire to be prime minister, while insisting they would not try to topple Turnbull, at least not yet.

At the heart of the worsening political instability are mounting economic and geo-strategic pressures bound up with Australian capitalism’s dependence on both the US and China, amid intensifying US preparations for trade war and war against China, Australia’s biggest export market.

These pressures are now taking an acute form. With a federal budget looming on May 8, Turnbull has been unable thus far to push through huge company tax cuts that the financial elite is demanding in order to compete globally and avert a feared withdrawal of investment to the US, which is Australia’s largest source of finance capital.

Turnbull also faces heightened demands from Washington to step up Canberra’s commitment to the US confrontation with China, including by massive military spending. This will mean further slashing social spending, and the passage of draconian “foreign interference” legislation directed against China.

Yet Turnbull’s government already confronts displeasure in Beijing, which is provoking public voices of concern from sections of Australian big business, especially in mining, agriculture and education that rely heavily on Chinese markets.

The immediate trigger for the open jostling among ministers was a Murdoch media Newspoll showing the government trailing the opposition Labor Party, on a “two-party preferred” basis for the 30th consecutive month. Turnbull cited a similar 30-poll deficit as a pretext for deposing his predecessor, Tony Abbott, in September 2015, saying “the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership.”

Such media polling gives a very distorted picture of popular disaffection. There is deep hostility toward the entire political establishment, driven by decades of declining working and living conditions and soaring inequality, which have accelerated since the 2008 global financial breakdown.

After Australia initially avoided the full impact of the 2008 meltdown, largely due to a mining boom fed by China’s debt-fuelled expansion, an economic and social crisis is deepening. Millions of working-class households are experiencing financial stress, under-employment, job insecurity and deteriorating basic services and infrastructure.

For the first time since World War II, average real wages have fallen, now for seven years in a row. Permanent jobs are being eliminated in favour of lower-paid casualised or contract employment. Soaring housing, energy and childcare prices have pushed up average debt levels to the highest in the world—more than 200 percent of household income.

Moreover, a housing market bubble, which kept much of the economy afloat after the mining boom collapsed, is showing signs of imploding, raising fears of widespread mortgage defaults and devastating financial fallout.

With parliament in recess until the week of the budget, no one is openly challenging yet for Turnbull’s post, but a federal election looms—due before mid-2019. For now, both the Murdoch and Fairfax Media outlets are urging the government to stop tearing itself apart and focus on the budget, which is being termed a “major test” for its survival.

Wednesday’s Australian Financial Review editorial urged the Coalition to halt the “killing seasons” of removing prime ministers, “and get ready to sell an election budget just a month away.”

The comment reflects growing criticism in ruling circles that Turnbull, a former merchant banker, has failed to deliver on the promises he made when he ousted Abbott. Turnbull vowed to provide “economic leadership” and implement the sweeping budget cuts that Abbott, because of widespread public opposition, had proved unable to impose.

For the past 10 years, one prime minister after another, Coalition and Labor alike, has tried to push ahead with the sweeping pro-market agenda demanded by the corporate elite.

In mid-2016, in a bid to break through the impasse, Turnbull called a double dissolution election for all members of both houses of parliament. But that left the government in an even worse position, reduced to a wafer-thin majority of one seat in the House of Representatives and a minority of just 30 seats in the 76-member Senate.

As a result, rifts have deepened between, and within, the Liberal and National parties. In particular, the most overtly right-wing and socially conservative factions that abandoned Abbott in 2015, and agreed to back Turnbull, are agitating against him, despite his repeated efforts to appease them. Divisions are festering over a range of issues, including immigration levels, energy and climate policy.

Similar turmoil is engulfing the entire political establishment. Recent state elections have displayed hostility not only to the two traditional ruling parties, the Coalition and Labor, but also the myriad “third parties” that have claimed to provide alternatives.

Conscious of the growing discontent, Labor Party leader Bill Shorten is posturing as an opponent of cuts to corporate taxes and social spending. However, he was a key minister in the previous Labor government, whose anti-working class measures saw Labor’s vote crash to record low levels, where it remains.

Support for the Greens has continued to fall since they propped up the minority Labor government from 2010 to 2013. Following recent disastrous election results, internal brawling has broken out between supporters of party leader Senator Richard Di Natale, who advocates entering coalition governments, and layers who fear that this orientation is further discrediting the Greens in the eyes of youth and workers.

The state elections in Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia also showed a considerable decline in support for the various right-wing populists that have tried to emulate Donald Trump by depicting themselves as “outsiders.” Feeding off years of betrayals by Labor and the unions, these formations are seeking to divert the political disaffection in reactionary nationalist directions, but are increasingly seen to be serving as props for the existing order.

This includes Senator Pauline Hanson’s rabid anti-immigrant One Nation, the now-rebadged Nick Xenophon Team, the Jacqui Lambie Network, and Senator Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, which split from the Liberals last year.

Of immense concern in the parliamentary establishment are emerging struggles of workers that threaten to trigger a genuine revolt by the working class against the ruling elite, after decades of suppression by the trade unions. Rail workers in New South Wales last month, for example, reportedly voted by the narrowest of margins—50.8 percent—to accept a regressive workplace agreement backed by their trade unions.

The unions, together with the state and federal governments, feared that any resumption of industrial action by the railway workers could have spread to other sections of the working class confronting job losses, escalating workloads and the erosion of conditions. Such a movement would immediately heighten the crisis wracking the parliamentary establishment.

War fever grips German media

Peter Schwarz

“Anyone who, at a meeting or through the distribution of writings, incites the crime of aggression will be punished with a custodial sentence of between three months and five years,” states paragraph 80A of Germany’s Criminal Code. The “crime of aggression”—i.e., the conducting of a war of aggression or any other act of aggression—is punishable by life imprisonment according to paragraph 13 of Germany’s International Criminal Code.

These paragraphs trace their origins directly to the Nuremberg Trials against the Nazis. If they were taken seriously, numerous German politicians and newspaper editors would be behind bars. 

The preparation of a military strike against Syria has unleashed war fever among Germany’s political parties and newspapers.

Die Welt, the flagship publication of the right-wing Springer publishing house, is demanding the “eradication of the Assad regime with a military engagement” and the deployment of “hundreds of thousands of soldiers” to Syria to “in the worst case scenario, fight Russians and Iranians.”

This language recalls not only the language of Hitler and Goebbels, who also described their war aims with vocabulary like “eradicate” and “exterminate.” It is also comparable with Hitler’s mad, criminal plans in terms of content. Hundreds of thousands of American and European troops fighting “against Russians and Iranians” would inevitably lead to a nuclear war that humanity would be highly unlikely to survive.

The statements appear in a comment published by Die Welt on Thursday from Jacques Schuster. Under the headline, “A war can’t begin with a mere symbolic strike,” the chief commentator for the Welt Group declares, “Assad must go!”

Schuster writes that there can be no objections to a military strike. The lesson of history is not “war, never again!”, but “aggression, never again!” There are times when precisely such aggression “has to be answered with force—whether from Trump or Macron.”

The lies and demagogy are breathtaking. Die Welt is justifying a war that would claim the lives of tens of thousands, if not millions, with an alleged gas attack in Syria, which has not been substantiated and bears all the hallmarks of a provocation. The orchestrated Racak massacre was used in a similar way to launch the war in Yugoslavia, and an alleged immanent massacre in Benghazi served to legitimise the destruction of Libya.

Schuster even manages to attack Trump from the right. He describes the US president “intellectually speaking” as “half-hearted,” and doubts whether he has “the will and ability” to conduct such a war. “The cool sobriety, the geostrategic understanding, the ability to think things through at least halfway to the end—he doesn’t have any of that.” A war can “not begin with such an obviously helpless symbolic strike, which will impress neither the Russians nor Assad. It should also not arise from the need to return to the world stage, as with France, the puffed-up military dwarf.”

“War with Assad,” according to Schuster, “should be conducted with one goal and question: Can the Assad regime be eradicated with one military engagement. Are the Americans and Europeans ready to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the country for this purpose and to fight Russians and Iranians if necessary?” By contrast, an air attack alone will “produce nothing.” It can “calm excited Western minds,” but the risk is not worth it.

Other commentators are advancing an equally provocative line.

Carsten Luther declares in Die Zeit, “The use of chemical weapons in Syria cannot be allowed to pass without consequences.” He praises US President Trump, who “entirely correctly maintained” that “whoever does such a thing must pay a ‘high price’ so that they don’t do so again.” Force is a “last resort. But you can’t do without force all the time.”

The editor for Die Zeit cynically attacks “naive pacifism” and “spiritual nationalism,” which always brandishes its favorite principle of international law: don’t intervene… To make this worldview fit,” they then “add a quick denunciation of US imperialism.”

Like Die Welt, Die Zeit considers air strikes to be inadequate. The fear is, according to Luther, that this will not be “the beginning of a more robust strategy from the West for this war,” but “merely the replacement for one.” The demand for an intervention by the international community is “not fulfilled with a one-off, negligible intervention.”

Luther asserted that this is “not an argument for a larger military operation which takes on the regime on all fronts and sets the goal of overthrowing Assad,” because this would also mean “war with Russia and Iran,” which would be “madness with incalculable consequences.” But this is obviously what is being discussed in the well-connected circles of government representatives and journalists in Berlin who determine government policy.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) even manages to outdo the provocations in Die Welt. Newspaper editor Berthold Kohler accused Assad on Thursday of capturing one city after another “with support from the Kremlin” by “laying waste to them or turning them into gas chambers.”

As if the Syrian government’s actions during a civil war, which has seen the Western-backed, financed and armed rebels brutally attack the population, is comparable with the industrial killing by the Nazis. The same newspaper defended the Berlin-based historian Jörg Baberowski against criticism of his statement, “Hitler was not vicious,” and his downplaying of the Nazi regime’s crimes.

The FAZ also praises President Trump. “Despite his incredible boasting, his willingness to act is finding support from important allies,” writes Kohler, “because there are reasons of morality and realpolitik to attack Assad.”

Kohler knows full well that a war on Syria would be illegal under international law, but he still praises the German government for supporting the war, writing, “Berlin wants to politically back the Americans, French and British, even though a strike against Assad would not be legal under international law.”

The Green Party-aligned TAZ also leant its support to the war drive. “Severe violations of human rights in the Syrian civil war should of course be punished,” commented Beate Seel on Thursday. Like Die Zeit and FAZ, she criticised the absence of “a strategy for the period thereafter.” However, she cloaked this call for a war strategy in typical TAZ language about a peace process overseen by the UN.

In the end she made clear that what is at stake is the securing of imperialist control over the resource-rich and strategically important Middle East. “It would be a grave mistake,” she wrote, “to leave the political terrain to the Astana group [Russia, Turkey and Iran], to determine Syria’s future.”

Algeria military plane crash kills 257

Eddie Haywood

On Wednesday, a military plane carrying soldiers and their family members crashed into a field shortly after takeoff a few miles from an airbase in Boufarik, Algeria, about 20 miles from capital city Algiers. Upon impact, the aircraft exploded into flames, killing 247 passengers, along with 10 crew members. Only a few have been reported to have survived. It is the deadliest crash in Algerian history.

The immediate cause of the disaster is as yet unknown. The head of the Algerian army, along with the vice-minister of defense visited the crash site, and told the media they would launch an investigation into the crash.

The plane was a Russian-made Ilyushin Il-76 military transport plane, an aircraft with a history of crashes. The most recent crash of an Il-76 was in 2016, when a plane crashed while flying a firefighting mission near Lake Baikal in Siberia, killing all 10 on board. In 2009, another Il-76 owned by the Iranian air force crashed near Varamin, in Tehran province, killing seven. Investigations conducted into the cause of both crashes resulted in inconclusive findings.

Algeria’s previous most deadly crash occurred in 2003, when 102 people were killed when a commercial airliner crashed at the end of the runway of Tamanrasset airport in southern Algeria. In 2014, an Lockheed C-130 piloted by the Algerian air force personnel slammed into a mountainous region in Oum El Bouaghi province, killing more than 70.

Video images of billowing smoke from the aircraft and a line-up of body bags at the crash site appeared on Algerian news site Algerie24, and showed the plane split in half, with the front of the plane in flames. Witnesses reported observing the wing of the plane engulfed in flames before the aircraft took a dive and slammed into the field.

The Algerian defense ministry issued a statement, “The number of martyrs has risen to 247 passengers and 10 members of the crew, most of whom are members of the army as well as their families.” The government declared three days of national mourning.

In addition to Algerian military personnel, there were a number of militants with the Polisario Front, a Western Saharan paramilitary separatist group which has been embroiled in conflict with the Moroccan government since 1973, when the organization began with the aim of establishing an independent state in southern Morocco.

Beginning in the 1960s as a national liberation movement, the Polisario Front and its military wing, the Sahrawi People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), were largely drawn from the Sahrawi tribal population of the former Spanish Sahara. The Algerian government has long declared its backing for the militant group.

The defense ministry added that the plane was bound for the remote Algerian town of Tindouf along the Moroccan border, before heading south to Béchar. Tindouf, the first stop of the plane’s itinerary, is the location of Sahrawi refugee camps set up in 1975 during the Western Saharan War. Algerian Ennahar Television reported that 26 of the passengers killed were Polisario returning to the Sahrawi refugee camps after seeking medical treatment at Algerian hospitals.

The largest African country by area, Algeria is rich in oil and gas deposits from which the majority of the population see little benefit. In recent years, the fall in oil prices has led to mass unemployment across Algeria’s energy sector and fostered discontent towards the regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in particular among youth, who represent half of the country’s 40 million residents.

Bouteflika’s full-throated support for Washington’s imperialist aims in the Mahgreb, and across the broader African continent has contributed to his unpopularity. Algeria has deployed tens of thousands of its forces in support various US military efforts, most recently to Mali and Libya. Additionally, Algeria allowed the CIA to place its Mahgreb-Sahel regional headquarters in the country.

With a poverty rate of 23.1 per cent, and chronically high youth unemployment, Algeria is a seething cauldron of social tension on the brink of explosion. Government cuts to fuel and food subsidies have only inflamed discontent within the masses.

A series of strikes have gripped the country in recent months. In February, teachers walked out across the country over low salary and poor working conditions, with schools in Algiers almost completely shut down for classes.

Doctors and medical personnel, along with medical students also walked out, leading to a court decision which ruled the strike illegal. In March, doctors and teachers defied the court order to return to work, and were joined by additional teachers and hospital workers who made the decision to strike. In response to the defiance of the court, police arrested and detained scores of teachers, doctors, and other medical workers.

The unrest by workers in Algeria has raised the specter of the so-called “Arab Spring”, the popular uprising that swept Northern Africa in 2011. The discontent brewing within the masses no doubt figures prominently into uncertainty and fear within the Algerian ruling elite of a mass social uprising that could sweep it from power.

World economy in danger of being “torn apart”

Nick Beams

On the eve of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual spring meeting in Washington next week, its managing director, Christine Lagarde, warned that the international trading system risks destruction because of growing protectionism.

In a speech at the University of Hong Kong on Wednesday, Lagarde said: “The multilateral trade system has transformed our world over the past generation. But that system of rules and shared responsibility is now in danger of being torn apart. This would be an inexcusable, collective policy failure.”

Lagarde did not specifically cite the actions of the Trump administration and its plans to impose tariffs on as much as $150 billion of Chinese goods annually but referred to the claim by “some people” that trade imbalances were caused by “unfair” trade practices.

While such practices existed, Lagarde said, bilateral trade imbalances generally were a snapshot of the division of labour across economies, including global value chains.

The first priority for the global economy was for governments to “steer clear of protectionism in all its forms”—a call that has been a regular feature of recent IMF policy pronouncements.

Yet it is a measure of how far and how fast events are moving in the other direction that a year ago such calls were directed to US opposition to having a commitment to “resist protectionism” being included in statements by global economic forums. Today the calls are aimed at actions already initiated by the Trump administration.

The IMF is expected to maintain its upbeat assessment for global economic growth when it issues its World Economic Outlook assessment. Growth in 2017 prompted the view that, finally, after nearly a decade, the effects of the 2008 financial crisis were being overcome.

Lagarde said the IMF could still see global momentum and continued to be optimistic. But while the current global picture remained bright, “we can see darker clouds looming,”

The reality was that the momentum expected for 2018 and 2019 would eventually slow, she said. “It will slow because of fading fiscal stimulus, including in the US and China; and because of rising interest rates and tighter financial conditions as major banks normalise monetary policy.”

In the longer term, with ageing populations and weak productivity, “you have a challenging medium-term outlook, especially in the advanced world,” she said.

There are some indications, however, that even the IMF’s predictions for solid growth over the next 18 months may not be met. In an article published April 8 the Wall Street Journal noted that “cracks” were forming in the global growth story, with a reassessment of the scenario that growth was “on the verge of blasting out of a long period of weakness.”

In the recent period “the global comeback has been in a bit of a rut,” the article said. “In the US, gauges of manufacturing and services activity have been pulling back. Retail sales have fallen for three straight months, construction spending decelerated at the start of the year, and auto sales have largely plateaued.” On top of this, there was a sharp slowdown in the growth of the US labour market last month.

A recent Financial Times article also pointed to slowing growth, posing the question: “Is the global economy starting to splutter?” It stated: “Despite the healthy employment picture, US retail sales unexpectedly fell in January and fell short of forecasts in February. European and Chinese retail sales also came in below economists’ expectations in February, and purchasing managers’ indices have weakened almost everywhere.”

The article cited a Bank of America poll of fund managers last month in which a record 74 percent concluded that the global economy was now in its “late cycle” and pointed to remarks by hedge fund manager Stephen Jen that the present turbulence on stock markets could be the beginning of the end of the bull run.

According the Jen, the “calm the world has enjoyed was the result of Herculean policy efforts that will have negative consequences in the quarters ahead. The calm will probably be followed by a storm.”

Jen was referring to the injection of trillions of dollars into the global monetary system by the US Federal Reserve and the other major central banks, which has played the key role in fuelling stock market speculation, above all in the US. But with banks seeking to “normalise” monetary policy by lifting interest rates, this could lead to a collapse of the financial bubble.

Significantly in her Hong Kong speech, Lagarde said that, as a result of easy financial conditions, global debt—public and private—had now reached an all-time high of $164 trillion.

Private debt made up two-thirds of the total, with public debt reaching levels not seen since World War II. Lagarde said if present trends continued, “many low-income countries will face unsustainable debt burdens.”

“The bottom line is that high debt burdens have left governments, companies and households more vulnerable to a sudden tightening of financial conditions. This potential shift could prompt market corrections, debt sustainability concerns, and capital flow reversals in emerging markets.”

It was necessary to use the current “window of opportunity” to prepare for the challenges ahead by “creating room to act when the next downturn inevitably comes.”

Another “downturn,” however, will not be a simple fluctuation in the business cycle but a major crisis because none of the underlying contradictions that produced the financial meltdown of 2008 has been resolved. In many ways, as the debt figures show, they have been intensified under conditions where the entire international trading and economic order is, in Lagarde’s words, “in danger of being torn apart.”

Trump signs executive order attacking US social programs

Matthew Taylor 

The Trump administration Tuesday initiated an assault on the social programs that serve the country’s poorest citizens, ordering departments throughout his cabinet to seek out new ways to gut existing programs and impose onerous work requirements for continuing assistance.

The executive order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” orders the departments of Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education to review all public assistance programs with the aim of determining which programs currently have work requirements attached to them. For those programs that lack such requirements the executive order demands that they either be eliminated or consolidated with programs that do, except where forbidden by law.

The order requires the cabinet secretaries of these departments to issue a report within 90 days outlining which programs will be eliminated and what new restrictions will be imposed. Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance and welfare programs all face being substantially diminished by the president’s order. The order also requires the various departments to identify which programs undocumented immigrants may benefit from, so that administrative or legislative action can be taken to prevent them from doing so.

Within the order, Trump lays out nine “principles of economic mobility” for how the order should be implemented. These “principles” consist of various right-wing talking points thinly cloaked in bureaucratic jargon.

These include principle (ii) which reads, “Promote strong social networks as a way of sustainably escaping poverty (including through work and marriage),” which implies that unemployment and broken families are the cause, rather than the result, of poverty and economic dislocation.

Principle (iv) states in part, “Balance flexibility and accountability both to ensure that State, local, and tribal governments, and other institutions, may tailor their public assistance programs to the unique needs of their communities,” or, in plain language, empowering state and municipal governments to impose restrictions on benefits beyond what the federal government is legally capable of implementing.

The final principle, (ix), reads, “Empower the private sector, as well as local communities, to develop and apply locally based solutions to poverty.” Or, in other words, allow private interests to administer and profit from whatever social spending remains after the administration has finished cutting.

The opening section of Trump’s order is also taken from a familiar script, suggesting that the social programs that millions rely upon have perpetuated poverty (actually, of course, the real grievance of the ultra-right is that these social programs allow the working poor to survive rather than die in the streets).

Section one of the order declares that “many of the programs designed to help families have instead delayed economic independence, perpetuated poverty, and weakened family bonds.” It goes on to salute the Clinton administration welfare reform of 1996, as “a step toward eliminating the economic stagnation and social harm that can result from long-term Government dependence,” while demanding that similar measures now be applied to other programs for the poor, like food stamps, home heating aid and Medicaid.

The social assistance programs enacted by the US government during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and later during the Johnson administration in the 1960s, were not created to ensure that all Americans would thrive economically, but rather to preserve capitalism and forestall the possibility of social revolution. Those programs, which provided minimal benefits to the most vulnerable members of society, have been continuously eroded by both Democratic and Republican administrations over the course of decades. At the same time, the economy in the US underwent a transformation as the ruling class shifted away from industrial production and toward financial speculation, wiping out millions of jobs and impoverishing broad layers of the US population.

The assertion by Trump that these social programs have prevented millions from escaping poverty is absurd. On the contrary, at the same time that these programs have been steadily diminished the concentration of wealth at the top layers of society has continued to grow dramatically. In 2017, 75 percent of all wealth created went to the top 10 percent of Americans, with the top 1 percent receiving 35.5 percent of this figure. The bottom 50 percent of the population received virtually none of this wealth, a mere 1.1 percent. For those ranked in the bottom 20 percent of the population, the share of new wealth created fell below zero, to negative 0.5 percent. Yet all this wealth was created by human labor.

This process mirrors global trends, wherein the social reforms of the mid-20th century that had resulted in a somewhat more equitable distribution of wealth have been rolled back by capitalist governments around the world, resulting in levels of inequality similar to the early 20th century.

Trump’s executive order is not aimed at making these programs more efficient, but rather at eliminating them altogether, as a prelude to the long-planned destruction of Social Security and Medicare. Any further restrictions on existing programs will eliminate whatever effectiveness they have left, as they have already been greatly reduced by previous reforms.

Work requirements are already in place for recipients of aid from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, what little remains of the program commonly known as “welfare.” The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or food stamps, provides only a minimal level of assistance to the 44 million Americans enrolled in the program and is subject to constant attacks by both Congress and the various state legislatures that administer it. Medicaid, which some 70 million Americans rely on for basic medical care, has already been targeted by the Trump administration, with the president issuing an order in January that allowed states to impose work requirements upon participants in the program.

All of these programs have a threshold for eligibility so low that only the very poorest citizens qualify for them. This has created conditions that have allowed the political elite, both Democrat and Republican, to drive a wedge between workers who are eligible for these programs and those who are not, with the ultimate aim of dismantling the social safety net in its entirety so as to ensure the further profitability of US capitalism.

In section II of the order, Trump cites the fact that in 2017 the US spent approximately $700 billion on social programs. This figure is very close to the official annual amount spent by the US each year arming its military and prosecuting its various wars overseas. Needless to say, the defense budget will not be subject to a similar pruning, as any money saved from cutting social programs will be invested in new military adventures.

The Democratic Party has predictably said nothing about Trump’s latest order attacking social programs. Instead, their efforts in the past week have been entirely devoted to pressuring the Trump administration to invade Syria, promoting further censorship of the Internet, and furthering the false narrative that Trump’s election was due to “Russian hacking” rather than the collapse of support by workers for the Democratic party.

Escalation of Syria war sends economic and strategic shockwaves across region

Jordan Shilton

The prospect of a US-led military onslaught on Syria, supported by its British and French imperialist allies, is already causing economic and geopolitical fallout across the region and beyond. Washington’s reckless escalation of the Syria war, threatens to provoke a military conflagration with Iran and Russia, the world’s second largest nuclear power.

Russian, Iranian, and Turkish economies roiled by war danger

Following Washington’s announcement last Friday of new sanctions on Russia, the rouble declined sharply in trading earlier this week. Russia’s RTS stock index slid 11.4 percent on Monday, its largest decline in over four years. The country’s top 50 oligarchs lost over $12 billion on the day.

While Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev claimed Thursday that the economic turmoil was “generally” under control, the situation remains highly volatile. US President Donald Trump’s provocative tweet Wednesday that the US would soon launch missiles at Syria sent the rouble tumbling, an indication that the economic impact on Russia of military action in Syria will be considerable.

In Turkey, the lira hit an all-time low Wednesday as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused unnamed actors of attacking the country’s economy. “There are games being played on our economy … We have thwarted them and will continue to thwart them. I call to those attacking our economy: You will not succeed,” he declared in Ankara.

An eruption of wider war could rapidly engulf Turkey, whose troops have been conducting a brutal offensive in northern Syria since January against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.

The Iranian currency is in free fall. The rial had already declined steadily over recent months as Iranians exchanged their currency holdings for dollars, fearing the demise of the nuclear accord with the US and European powers. But the pace picked up over the past week, with the rial falling 8 percent in a day.

On Monday, Iran’s government imposed a new exchange rate of 42,000 rial to the dollar and prohibited Iranians from holding more than €10,000 worth of currency outside the country’s banking system. Traders who continue to sell the rial at a cheaper rate will be prosecuted, and individuals violating the €10,000 rule face the threat of smuggling charges.

An Iranian banker told the Financial Times the currency devaluation would have serious economic consequences, adding: “The currency market fluctuations will have a domino effect, pushing up inflation and damaging domestic production and job opportunities.”

Israel readies for regional war

Israel has vowed to launch a devastating military operation in Syria should Iran retaliate to the killing of at least seven of its military personnel in an air strike likely carried out by Tel Aviv on a Syrian air base Monday.

US, Syrian, Russian and Iranian sources reported that the strike, which hit the Syrian T4 air base near Palmyra, was conducted by Israeli F-15 jets from Lebanon. They also noted that, unlike previous Israeli strikes in Syria, including a February attack on the T4 base, Tel Aviv did not inform Moscow in advance. Israeli officials refused to confirm or deny launching the air strike.

“Assad’s regime and Assad himself will disappear from the map and the world if the Iranians do try to harm Israel or its interests from Syrian territory,” senior Israeli defence officials were cited as saying by the Jerusalem Post.

These remarks come just weeks after the Israeli army carried out major exercises simulating an intervention into Syria under conditions in which Russia tries to block Israeli operations. The exercises included a scenario where fighting with Hezbollah broke out in Lebanon alongside the conflict in Syria, before spreading to the Gaza Strip.

As these war games were under way, the Israeli military carried out a joint air defence exercise, known as “Juniper Cobra,” with the US to simulate a missile attack on Israel. “There’s a message here to all the players in the region, and also to guests in the region, that our relationship with the United States is not just strategic, but operative in real time,” a senior officer told Haaretz .

At his government’s weekly cabinet meeting Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed ministers not to discuss security matters publicly due to the “sensitive reality” in the region. Netanyahu held talks with top defence officials Wednesday, and the Israeli Army remains on high alert in the north.

Tensions rise in the Gulf

Saudi Arabia reported Wednesday that it downed three missiles fired at its cities by Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Yemen war, which is now in its fourth year, has seen Riyadh, backed with weapons and logistics by the US, Britain and Canada, wage an onslaught on the civilian population, killing over 10,000. The Saudis accuse the Houthis of receiving support from Tehran as part of Iranian efforts to contain Saudi influence in the region.

Riyadh is involved in the discussions for, and could well take part in, military action in Syria. Jaish al-Islam, the Islamist militia that controlled the city of Douma when the allegations about the use of chemical weapons were made last Saturday, has been one of the main recipients of Saudi aid among the so-called Syrian opposition groups.

Following a visit to the US earlier this month, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continued his tour of Riyadh’s imperialist allies with a stop in Paris this week for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron. At a joint press conference, Macron declared that he and bin Salman agreed on the need to respond to the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma and to reduce Iranian ballistic missile activity in the region. Bin Salman confirmed that Riyadh may join strikes on Damascus.

Riyadh is ratcheting up tensions with Qatar, which has faced a blockade by Saudi Arabia since last June due to Doha’s ties with Iran. Riyadh announced plans April 5 to build a military base and nuclear waste dump on the Saudi-Qatari border. The plan involves digging a 60 kilometre-long canal, which would turn the peninsula of Qatar into an island.

Turkey and Greece in military clash

A Greek fighter pilot was killed Thursday after his jet crashed into the Aegean Sea during a mission to intercept Turkish aircraft that, according to Athens, violated Greek airspace. Ankara denied that any of its planes were in the area Thursday.

Greek interceptions of Turkish aircraft have risen sharply over recent weeks. On Monday, Greek forces opened fire on a Turkish helicopter that allegedly strayed into Greek airspace with its lights off. Athens and Ankara have a territorial dispute over two islets in the Aegean, known as Imia in Greece and Kardak in Turkey. The dispute took the two countries to the brink of war in 1996.

Tensions between the two countries were heightened when the Greek Supreme Court refused to extradite eight Turkish soldiers who fled following the failed July 2016 coup against Erdogan. Turkey retaliated by refusing to return two Greek soldiers captured in Turkish territory last month. While Ankara accuses them of being spies, Athens claims they strayed over the border in bad weather.

European air traffic control agency issues war alert to pilots

Eurocontrol, the European Union’s air traffic control agency, issued a warning to all pilots Wednesday to exercise caution in the Eastern Mediterranean over the next 72 hours due to potential missile launches. According to Eurocontrol, the use of air-to-ground and cruise missiles could result in the temporary disruption of radio communications.

The alert went on to warn pilots to be prepared for specific NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen) concerning flight risks or obstacles that could arise.