IMF endorses Sri Lankan government budget

Saman Gunadasa

The second reading of the 2019 government budget presented by Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera was passed by the Sri Lankan parliament on Tuesday. The final vote on the United National Party (UNP)-led government’s measures, which are in line with International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands, will be taken on April 5, after further debate.

The IMF mission chief for Sri Lanka, Manuela Goretti, told the Dailyft on Tuesday that “a prudent policy mix is necessary” because the government faced a “public debt at over 90 percent of GDP, large refinancing needs, and low reserve buffers.” Samaraweera’s budget, she declared, “strikes an adequate balance by advancing fiscal consolidation.”

In 2016, the IMF approved a $US1.5 billion bailout loan to Sri Lanka. The final two instalments, amounting to $500 million, however, were suspended last October. This was in response to President Maithripala Sirisena’s sacking of the pro-US Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister and the eruption of bitter faction fighting inside Colombo’s ruling elite.

Sirisena appointed former President Mahinda Rajapakse as prime minister and then, after Rajapakse failed to win a parliamentary majority, dissolved the parliament.

The US, which regards Rajapakse as pro-Chinese, opposed his appointment. In December, the Sri Lankan Supreme Court overturned Sirisena’s dissolution of parliament, compelling him to reappoint Wickremesinghe as prime minister.

While the IMF, following requests from Colombo, agreed to recommence its loan program in February, Goretti reminded the Dailyft that the resumption of IMF funding required “the government to return to the basics.” She called for more state-owned enterprises (SOE) to be brought under its scrutiny through “Statements of Corporate Intent”—i.e., making them commercially viable through downsizing and by increasing prices or charges. She also warned the government that the budget deficit target of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product had to be observed.

With provincial council and presidential elections due at the end of this year, it was expected that the UNP-led government would attempt to make some concessions in its 2019 budget. But facing a massive debt crisis and the IMF dictates, the government announced a few cosmetic measures while moving to boost tax revenue.

The token concessions include a 2,500-rupee ($US14) rise in the monthly salaries of state sector employees and a 600,000 increase in the number of people receiving Samurdhi (limited living allowance) welfare payments. Currently about 1.3 million Samurdhi recipients are only paid between 1,500 and 3,500 rupees per month. Other proposals include concessionary loans for small businesses, self-employed persons and students for private education fees.

Prior to the release of Samaraweera’s proposals, the government’s plantation minister claimed that the budget would include a 50-rupee increase in the daily allowance paid to estate workers. While this did not occur, the government, in an attempt to deflect the anger of estate workers, has made an arrangement for a 50-rupee monthly allowance to be paid through Tea Board earnings. These payments, however, will only last for a year.

Plantation workers held a nine-day national strike in December to demand a 100 percent pay increase and lift their poverty-level basic daily wage to 1,000 rupees. The plantation companies rejected this and, with the connivance of the unions and blessing of the government, only increased the daily wage by 40 percent while slashing previous hard-won allowances.

The UNP-led government faces mounting opposition from workers over its attack on social rights. Together with working-class struggles around the world, protests have erupted among farmers and fishermen over subsidy cuts and from students opposing the privatisation of education.

In line with the IMF austerity demands, the budget contains new taxes and rate increases. These include:

* A 12 percent increase in excise duty on cigarettes

* Higher excise duties on local hard liquor and malt liquor, up by 8 percent and 12 percent respectively

* A 3.5 percent tax on all foreign payments by credit cards

* An increase in the embarkation fee to $US10.

Finance Minister Samaraweera also announced new steps towards the privatisation of the Sri Lankan railways. The rail service, he declared, would be improved “in conjunction with the private sector” and “allow the private sector to lease/rent Sri Lanka railway carriages.”

According to the Institute of Policy Studies, a government think tank, indirect taxes, which are mainly paid by working people, constituted 84 percent of all tax revenue last year.

Samaraweera said that the government would move to increase taxes paid by small businesses, self-employed people and other sectors of the working population, including by the establishment of a Revenue Intelligence Unit. At the same time, he announced enhanced tax concessions for wealthy investors where investments are over $100 million and $1 billion.

The government’s estimated total revenue and grants for 2019 is 2.4 trillion rupees and total expenditure of 4.6 trillion rupees, with the deficit expected to be around 2.2 trillion. Almost all the deficit will be financed by borrowings.

On March 7, the Central Bank floated an international sovereign bond auction to borrow $2.4 billion for $5.9 billion debt repayments due this year. The government paid $1 billion towards the debt in January and is required to pay $2.4 billion in April. These figures point to the depth of the economic crisis facing the Sri Lankan capitalist class.

The 2019 budget allocated 393 billion rupees for the armed forces and police but only 187 and 105 billion rupees for education and health respectively.

Health and education spending is almost the same as the allocation last year and the combined amount is 100 billion rupees less than that provided to defence and police. The security forces and the police are routinely deployed by the government to suppress demonstrations and protests by workers, the poor and students.

Big business responded to the budget by demanding more concessions. The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce said the budget was “realistic” but voiced its displeasure at the government’s failure to address the privatisation of the state-owned enterprises. It also raised concerns about last year’s 3 percent growth rate and said the growth estimate for 2019, “is not a positive signal for business climate.”

President Sirisena, who collaborated with the UNP government for four years to impose wide-ranging attacks on workers’ social and democratic rights, made clear the austerity had to continue.

“It was not possible to address all the demands, because the country is facing severe economic crisis,” he said, referring to the proposed budget. “All of us have to understand [that] carrying out demonstrations, strikes, protests, marches, demanding allowances and facilities, will only further weaken the economy.”

Sirisena, who cynically calls for “stable government,” hopes to win reelection as president with the support of Rajapakse’s faction. Rajapakse and his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), however, are appealing to the military and organising with various extreme-right Sinhala chauvinist formations. Their declared agenda is for the establishment of a “strong government" of their own party.

Confronting massive debts and the growing mass opposition, all factions of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite are preparing for police-state forms of rule to impose the full burden of the mounting economic crisis on the working class and the poor.

Rise in UK opioid prescriptions contributes to surge in overdose fatalities

Margot Miller

A study by the British Journal of General Practice reveals an alarming rise in the number of National Health Service (NHS) prescriptions for opioids issued by General Practitioners (GPs). This is greatest in the more deprived areas of the country.

“Patterns of regional variation of opioid prescribing in primary care in England: a retrospective observational study” provides further proof that life expectancy, health, and access to health care is very much a function of the most fundamental division of society under capitalism—class. Poverty and the stresses that it brings is a major killer.

Opioids are prescribed for pain relief, especially acute pain in cancer and end of life care, or for short-term use after an injury or surgery. The most commonly known are morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, tramadol and codeine. Fentanyl is so powerful it is used to knock out elephants and is also used in executions. Six or seven grains of the substance can prove lethal.

The consequences of long-term use of opioids can be devastating, often leading to death.

The British Journal of General Practice records that “[m]ore opioids were prescribed in the north than in the south of England, and more opioids were prescribed in areas of greater social deprivation.”

The 10 highest areas for GP opioid prescribing are NHS Blackpool Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), and CCGs in St Helens, Lincolnshire East, Knowsley, Barnsley, Corby, Halton, Great Yarmouth and Waveney, Doncaster and South Tees—all areas with the highest concentrations of deprivation. Nine out of 10 of these areas are in the largely de-industrialised north of England, which are blighted by poverty.

Dr Roger Knaggs, associate professor in clinical pharmacy practice at the University of Nottingham, noted that these drugs are not suitable for relieving long-term chronic pain, such as back pain, arthritis and nerve pain. Their efficacy decreases with use over time, they come with side effects and are highly addictive.

One of the authors of the opioid study, Luke Mordecai, a pain research fellow at University College London Hospital, has called for a national register to monitor patients on the equivalent of more than 120mg of morphine a day. “There should be a national database to keep track of these people,” he said. “There is very high morbidity and mortality [among them], a lot of it avoidable.”

International attention has turned to the dangerous consequences of the increasing use or misuse of these powerful drugs, most catastrophically in the United States. In 2017, US deaths from drug overdoses reached 72,000—6,000 more than the previous year-on increase of 9.5 percent. Of these deaths 30,000 were associated with opioids, up more than 9,000 from 2016. Pharmaceutical companies have made bonanza profits by selling medications whose addictive properties they have previously denied.

A study by the Sunday Times found a correlation between areas with higher prescribing of opioids and higher death rates. Mortality in the northeast at 6 per 100,000 is double the national average of 3 per 100,000. Wales comes next (5 per 100,000), followed by the northwest (5 per 100,000) and Yorkshire and Humber (4 per 100,000). London has the lowest mortality figures, with 2 per 100,000.

Figures for 2017, the latest available, show there were three times more opioid related deaths in the North East and North West (512) in comparison to London (159), with the equivalent population size. Swansea in Wales has the highest death rate from opioids in England and Wales. According to the Office for National Statistics, 16 people per 100,000 died from opioids in Swansea in 2017.

Opioid addiction is becoming a problem among those over 60. The number in this age group undergoing treatment for opioid addiction has risen a staggering 300 percent in the last decade. The Sunday Times revealed that in 2017-18, 2,520 needed treatment for addiction.

While not as acute as in the US, the increased prescribing of opioids points to a mounting social crisis, marked by a woefully inadequate health service starved of funds by years of austerity since the global financial crash of 2008.

NHS Improvement, the regulator of the country’s NHS trusts, calculated that the combined NHS trusts are carrying a total deficit of £4.3 billion. Research and development into new treatments is abysmally low, both comparatively and in real terms. The UK Public Spending website projects a measly £1.9 billion will be spent on research and development in 2019, compared to £48.3 billion on defence.

Eytan Alexander, chief executive of UK Addiction Treatment, told the BBC, “GPs must accept responsibility for consistently overprescribing … A rate of 79 packs [prescriptions] per minute is just not acceptable. It is vital that alternatives are provided.”

The problem is that GPs treating patients in distress have little alternative than to prescribe something that is potentially harmful if used long-term. Research into providing effective pain relief solutions with minimal side effects is very low on the priority list of any government, Conservative or Labour.

Alternative holistic treatments to long-term pain management, while available privately, are not widely on offer in the cash-starved NHS. Only 40 percent of NHS pain consultants can adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to pain management, including a psychologist and physiotherapist.

That the working class is bearing the brunt of this crisis is no surprise. Manual workers are more likely to suffer muscular-skeletal injuries due to the nature of the work they do. The rate for men and women reporting chronic pain is much higher in the lowest rather than in the upper income quartile.

Another indication of the deepening social crisis in the UK is the increasing uptake of antidepressants. Rates of antidepressant use across all ages increased by 5 percent between 2015-16 and 2017-18, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The British Journal of General Practice concludes from its findings that “Questions of equality of care arise from higher prescription rates in the north of England and in areas of greater social deprivation.”

The increase in opioid use corresponds to the changing nature of the work environment. Speed-up is the order of the day. In companies like Amazon, workers are encouraged to compete to achieve backbreaking targets, on pain of dismissal, expedited by temporary contracts. A higher likelihood of work-related injury follows.

The culture of work has been transformed. Wages have been driven down, and the right to sickness benefits eroded, expressed by the fact that sickness is routinely treated as a disciplinary matter.

Many workers are now referred to Human Resources after a period of sickness and must attend a back-to-work review when they return to the job. Disciplinary proceedings kick in after a certain number of absences, regardless of a doctor’s sick note. The pressure is on to work through injuries that need time and rest to heal. Workers resort to aggressive pain killers to enable them to continue working out of fear of the economic consequences of missed work.

Responsibility for this assault on wages and conditions must be laid at the door of the trade unions. They actively collaborate with employers, pitting workers in the UK against those in other countries, to make UK industry more competitive on the world market and an attractive cheap labour proposition for foreign investment.

The struggle for equality in health and all areas of social life is bound up with the fight for socialism, which means the working class taking hold of society’s wealth and resources—at present being squandered by a tiny, parasitic minority—to use for the benefit of all.

Canada ever more deeply implicated in US-engineered coup attempt in Venezuela

Laurent Lafrance

If we look independent enough, we can do things for you that even the CIA cannot do.—former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

As the political crisis in Venezuela deepens, the leading role that Canada and the Trudeau government are playing in the ongoing US-orchestrated coup becomes ever more evident. Like its US counterpart, Canadian imperialism covets Venezuela’s vast oil resources and is determined to prevent Russia, China, and other “strategic rivals” from expanding their influence in the Americas, even if this naked pursuit of predatory interests threatens to unleash a bloody conflagration.

On February 25, US Vice President Mike Pence was invited to address a meeting in Bogotá of the Lima Group, a coalition of US allies in the region co-founded and led by Canada. In a bellicose speech, Pence vowed “there is no turning back” in Venezuela and reiterated US President Donald Trump’s threat that “all options are on the table”—a code name for military action—in forcing Nicolás Maduro and his bourgeois nationalist regime from power.

Following Pence’s speech, the Lima Group, which consists of Canada and thirteen Latin American countries, issued a statement reiterating its support for the self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó and supporting Pence’s demand that the Venezuelan military complete the US-led coup by switching its allegiance from Maduro, the country’s elected president, to the would-be US puppet ruler.

Only two group members, Mexico and Uruguay, refused to support the statement. But Canada is working behind the scenes, apparently with some success, to prevail on Mexico to abandon its current stance of urging a mediated settlement between Maduro and Venezuela’s right-wing, pro-US opposition.

Speaking on behalf of the Lima Group, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said, “We reiterated our conviction that the transition to democracy must be conducted by the Venezuelans themselves, peacefully, within the framework of the constitution, in accordance with international law and supported by political and diplomatic means, without the use of force.”

This is a subterfuge. By ruling out military intervention, at this point, Canada only seeks to distance itself from the Trump administration’s bellicose threats, the better to support the US-led regime-change operation; and all the while laying the political groundwork for a naval blockade or outright invasion should the escalating economic sanctions—themselves an act of aggression tantamount to war—prove insufficient.

Established in 2017 with the ostensible purpose of brokering a “peaceful” resolution to the growing social-political crisis in Venezuela, the Lima Group’s real objective—and this is epitomized by Canada’s role within it—is to provide the US imperialist intrigues in the country with a “humanitarian” and “democratic” façade.

As the radical journalist Yves Engler noted in a recent comment on Canada’s role in the US-orchestrated coup in Venezuela, former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien once made a revealing comment that points to how Canadian imperialism aids and abets its US allies. Chrétien told US President Bill Clinton, “Keeping some distance will be good for both of us. If we look as though we’re the fifty-first state of the United States, there’s nothing we can do for you internationally, just as the governor of a state can’t do anything for you internationally. But if we look independent enough, we can do things for you that even the CIA cannot do.”

Pence’s intervention at the Bogotá meeting underscored that while the US is not formally a member of the Lima Group, Canada and its Latin American allies are working in tandem with it. In fact, the Lima Group is directly involved in the US war plans, as shown by last week’s meeting in Florida between the head of the Colombian armed forces, Maj. Gen. Luis Navarro Jiménez, and leaders of the Pentagon’s Southern Command.

Like the US, Canada blamed the Maduro regime for the violence that took place during last month’s US-staged provocation at the Venezuelan-Colombian border over the purported “humanitarian aid” convoy. Freeland and Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau immediately issued a statement demanding that “the perpetrators” of this “unacceptable violation of basic humanitarian principles and human decency … be brought to justice.” With the aim of legitimizing the overthrow of Venezuela’s elected president and justifying future military action, Canada has already petitioned the International Criminal Court to investigate the Maduro regime.

However, the attempt of the US, Canada and the Venezuelan opposition to whip up a propaganda furore over the “aid” convoy quickly unraveled. Last weekend even the New York Times had to concede that it was forces loyal to the Venezuelan opposition who set the “aid” truck fire in a calculated provocation.

Like the Trump administration, Canada is using the Venezuelan government’s blocking of the Trojan Horse “aid convoy” to justify imposing harsher sanctions against officials in the Venezuelan government. Freeland said that Canada has “put many of the senior leaders in the Maduro regime on our sanctions list” and is now “discussing with our partners ways that that sanctions list can be expanded in order to have even more bite.”

Since 2018, several Venezuelan officials have been targeted by US and Canadian sanctions. Needless to say, such actions are not taken against regimes aligned with Ottawa and Washington that have far worse records of human rights abuses, such as the al-Sisi dictatorship in Egypt or the Saudi absolutist monarchy.

Pence’s demand that the member states of the Lima Group transfer ownership of any Venezuelan assets within their borders, including those of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, to the Guaidó-led “interim government” is an idea jointly developed by the Washington Inter-American Dialogue think-tank and the Canadian Centre for International Governance Innovation, based in Waterloo, Ontario.

The current attempt to oust the Maduro regime is the culmination of a longstanding US imperialist destabilization campaign, including a failed US-orchestrated coup against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in 2002.

A Canadian Press report published at the end of January revealed that Canadian diplomats worked systematically over several months with their Latin American counterparts in Caracas to prepare the current regime-change operation, pressing Maduro’s right-wing opponents to set aside their differences and mount a joint challenge to the government. “The turning point,” said the Canadian Press, “came Jan. 4, when the Lima Group … rejected the legitimacy of Maduro’s May 2018 election victory and his looming January 10 inauguration, while recognizing the ‘legitimately elected’ National Assembly.” The report cited an unnamed Canadian official as saying the opposition “were really looking for international support of some kind, to be able to hold onto a reason as to why they should unite, and push somebody like Juan Guaidó.”

One day prior to Maduro’s inauguration, Freeland spoke to Guaidó, the newly-elected National Assembly speaker, by telephone to urge him to challenge the elected Venezuelan president.

Like Washington, Canadian imperialism is determined to install a client regime in Venezuela so as to advance its predatory ambitions in Latin America and counter the growing presence of Russia and China in the region.

Canadian financial and mining companies are very active in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a region that possesses some 25 percent of the world’s forests and an estimated 35 percent of the globe’s potential hydroelectricity, as well as 85 percent of all known reserves of lithium and a third of copper, bauxite and silver. The region is also rich in coal, oil, gas and uranium, and underwater oil reserves are regularly being discovered along its coast lines.

In their 2016 book Blood of extraction: Canadian imperialism in Latin America, Todd Gordon and Jeffrey Webber detail the expansion of Canadian capital in the LAC and the outright criminal actions of Canadian companies to secure access to the region’s resources and vast pool of cheap labour.

In 1990, Canadian capital in Latin America, in the form of cumulative Foreign Direct Investment or FDI, stood at C$2.58 billion. By 2000 it had risen to C$25.3 billion, an increase of 800 percent, and by 2013 to C$59.4 billion, an increase of 134 percent from 2000, and 2,198 percent from 1990. From 2007 to 2012, Canada was the second largest external source of FDI in the LAC region, trailing only the US.

LAC countries account for over half of Canadian mining assets held abroad, some C$72.4 billion. There were only two Canadian mines in operation in the region in 1990. By 2012, that number had jumped to eighty, with another 48 in the development or feasibility stage. The operating mines generated combined revenues of C$19.3 billion in 2012 for Canadian companies. In 2014, 62 percent of all producing mines in the region were owned by companies headquartered in Canada.

Behind a smokescreen of bogus “humanitarian” rhetoric, it is these multi-billion dollar investments and the hopes of still greater loot and plunder that are driving Canada’s government to play a leading role in the US-led regime change operation in Venezuela, the country that is home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The Trudeau government and Canadian big business are determined to grab the biggest slice of the pie possible in Latin America, even if it means subjecting the region’s long-suffering workers and toilers to dictatorship and war.

Trump proposes slashing public education by $7 billion

Shelley Connor

Taking aim squarely and unapologetically at the children of the working class, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2020, calling for cutting education spending by over $7 billion. At the same time, the administration is asking for $5 billion to fund “scholarship funds” for private and religious schools. The administration is also asking for an extra $133 million to pursue young people who have defaulted on their student loans.

The American education system is already in a shambles. In 42 states, the average teacher salary has been cut, relative to inflation, since 2010. Average class sizes have grown in 35 states. Massive teacher shortages grip every state and increasingly students are “taught” by uncertified substitutes. Lead-in-water is found in schools around the country while school infrastructure crumbles. Teacher strikes continue to escalate in the face of what has been an unrelenting bipartisan war against public education.

Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are picking up from where Barack Obama and Arne Duncan left off, deepening the defunding of education and promoting privatization. Among the programs to suffer from Trump’s proposed budget are teacher training, federally subsidized student loans, after school programs for impoverished students, and summer programs in impoverished schools.

Teacher training is covered by Title II funding and received about $2 billion for fiscal year 2019. These funds are allocated for teachers’ professional development programs and were initially instituted to encourage a common standard of professionalism across the United States. The Trump budget would completely eliminate these funds.

Trump has proposed stripping away Title II funds in every budget he has proposed since taking office. These cuts do more than stymie the professional development of teachers—which is in and of itself an outrage—they also endanger schools’ abilities to meet the professional development benchmarks set by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In addition, teachers who are not adequately supported in their professional development cannot be expected to meet the instructional needs of their students, which impacts students’ test scores. ESSA ties grant money to professional development benchmarks and student test scores, so ending Title II funds will directly translate into further cuts especially in impoverished areas.

Teacher training is not the only area facing erasure under Trump’s proposals. Also at stake are funds for Title IV, Part A, The Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE) program. This program is designed to “provide all students with access to a well-rounded education; improve school conditions for student learning; and improve the use of technology t o improve the academic achievement and digital literacy of all students .”

The SSAE funds after-school care and summer learning programs in many districts where working parents do not have access to safe, affordable childcare when school is out. It also provides funding for classroom technology that assists in instruction and helps children stay abreast of important technological developments. In some schools, SSAE funding provides for mental health counseling and school safety equipment. Funding for SSAE is currently inadequate at just over $1 billion. Trump would eliminate all of that funding, endangering the programs that depend upon it.

Another source of funding for after-school care, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, would, like the SSAE programs, be completely eliminated under Trump’s proposals. Schools in rural and urban districts rely upon these funds, sparse as they are, to create safe places for working-class children.

The administration has stressed that its budget does not touch current Title I or Special Education funding. However, neither does the administration add any funding to these important programs. Title I funds go to schools that are predominantly attended by children from low-income families. Those funds are supposed to go towards helping children in these schools succeed academically and perform well on tests. Title I funds would stagnate at just under $16 million.

Special Education would not receive any extra funding in fiscal year 2020, either, and would stagnate at $132 million. Special Education funds programs as diverse as reading remediation, occupational therapy for autistic students, and enrichment for gifted and talented students.

Neither Title I nor the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have ever been fully funded, and both were slashed under the Obama administration. While the administration proudly boasts that these programs will not be cut, their funding up to this point has been little more than an insult to the nation’s educators, parents, and students. In many school districts, there is simply not enough personnel to ensure that an Individualized Education Program (IEP) is created for every student who needs one.

That the administration should suggest that Special Education funds stagnate while the president attacks funding such as teacher training and SSAE programs—which would benefit Special Education students, in particular—reveals the deep disdain the Trump administration harbors for working class students.

A recent hearing by the House Education and Labor Committee revealed that US schools have been so defunded over decades that $145 billion is needed every year to modernize and maintain public schools.

Funding for Indian Education programs remains despicably low, yet to add insult to injury, the administration proposes reducing the Indian Education budget from $180 million to $176 million. The education of indigenous children is mandated to the Federal Government by treaty, yet schools that serve Native Americans are chronically underfunded, understaffed, and inadequately maintained. The dropout rate for Native American high school students is twice the national average.

There are areas where the Trump administration is willing to spend education dollars. One such area is charter school grants, which he increased last year by nearly $150 million. This year, he would increase spending on charter schools from $440 million to an even $500 million. This does not include Betsy DeVos’ support for legislation that would earmark $5 billion for “tax credit scholarships,” in which individuals could donate 10 percent of their income (getting a dollar for dollar deduction in the process) to private school scholarship funds for students in impoverished school districts.

DeVos has requested $1.8 billion for her Next Generation Financial Services Environment (NextGen), an endeavor to attack financial aid for working class college students and to bring student loan holders to heel. A $133 million spending increase on pursuing the repayment of student loans is included with this amount. In the meantime, DeVos and Trump would put an end to student loan forgiveness for public-sector workers; they would also cut college work-study programs by more than half.

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development, Jim Blew, told reporters last week that Trump’s proposed education budget “is based on a desire to have some fiscal discipline and to address some higher-priority needs for the administration around the federal government.”

Those “higher priority needs” are not the children of America’s workers, but the gargantuan build-up of the US military and drive for war. In his budget proposal, Trump has asked for an exorbitant and record-breaking $750 billion for the Pentagon, an increase nearly double that sought by the military establishment. Additional billions are slated to flow into domestic repression with the administration requesting an increase to the Department of Homeland Security’s budget by 15 percent with $8.6 billion slated for the construction of his militarized border wall with Mexico.

As the World Socialist Web Site has noted, the Trump budget will set in motion a repeat of the time-honed and cynical charade by Democrats who will claim to be shocked by these cuts. Quickly, they will drop the pretense and sign onto a terrible deepening of the social counterrevolution against youth, students and the entire working class.

Closure of Brazil Ford plant to destroy up to 27,000 jobs

Miguel Andrade

The announced closure of the second-oldest Ford plant in Brazil, in the city of São Bernardo in the so-called ABC industrial belt surrounding São Paulo, is threatening up to 27,000 jobs across the auto production chain throughout the state.

The plant, previously hailed as a “model” for agreements allowing the same workforce to produce both the Fiesta small car model and Cargo-line trucks, currently employs 4,500 workers, of whom 1,500 are contract workers heavily concentrated on the production line. The plant’s products will be discontinued as Ford abandons the truck market altogether in South America.

The plant closure was announced on February 19 and reiterated on March 12, when the union gathered workers at the plant’s gate to announce that its meeting with Ford bosses in Detroit on February 7 had failed to change the decision. The company claims the move is justified by $678 million in losses in the South American market and the excessive cost imposed by stricter environmental regulations in Brazil regarding greenhouse gas emissions, set to be implemented in the coming years.

The announcement comes against a backdrop of continued economic slump in Brazil, with a stagnant economy and a renewed increase in unemployment. At the end of 2018, the jobless rate stood at 12 percent, or 12.7 million workers. GDP growth was barely 1.1 percent in 2018.

The situation is particularly dire for industrial output, which remains 17 percent lower than its historic peak in 2011. Auto production remains at only 67 percent of its 2012 peak.

This abysmal economic situation has produced a 14 percent unemployment rate in São Paulo, the leading industrial state in the country, and an 18 percent rate in the ABC region, which has a population of over 2.5 million.

Predictably, the ABC Metalworkers Union’s reaction to Ford’s February 19 announcement was to declare a toothless strike consisting of sending workers home at the beginning of the daily shifts and visiting the offices of local, state and federal authorities in order to convince them to crawl to Ford with offers of increased subsidies. The tone of the reaction was summed up by São Bernardo’s mayor, Orlando Morando, who told the press on February 21 that he was “outraged” by the company’s decision, since he “never denied the company’s demands.” He similarly told the daily Folha de S. Paulo on the day of the announcement that Ford’s decision was “impossible to predict” after the city had renovated the highways leading to the plant and granted it further tax breaks. He then asked the Folha reporter, rhetorically: “Is this about taxes? What are the subsidies they need, what are their needs?”

In later interviews, both the mayor and the union’s president, Wagner Santana, cited as an example for Ford the February 7 sellout deal at General Motors, in which the union agreed to a two-tier system and wage freezes, while the state government pledged a 25 percent break on sales tax in exchange for investments.

The deal was rammed through after GM threatened to close one of its Brazilian plants, even after guaranteeing investments in 2015 supposedly in exchange for the union’s agreement to halve the wages at the São José plant, 90 km northeast of São Paulo, the company’s second largest in the country.

The union bosses at Ford now promise that the union “will have a say” in the state government’s efforts to find a buyer for the plant—during the course of which the unions will work to corner workers into accepting firings, more subcontracting and even lower wages, even in the face of 7.5 billion reais (US$ 2 billion)—in subsidies to Ford alone in the last five years.

In contrast to the cowardly reaction of the union bureaucrats, in 1990 a wildcat strike developed into the occupation of the plant and a 50-day stoppage against the erosion of wages under conditions of rising inflation.

The closure of the Ford plant exposes the lie that endless concessions—through which workers are being reduced to poverty conditions in the most advanced industrial region in South America—can stop plant closures. But it also exposes the transformation of the unions internationally, under conditions of globalized capitalist production, from securing limited concessions from their own bourgeoisies, into instruments for enforcing labor discipline and extracting ever greater concessions from the workers to increase corporate profit.

The closure has also laid bare the parallel process that has characterized the Workers Party (PT), which was established in the wake of massive strikes in the late 1970s, including at Ford, which brought down the country’s 21-year, US-backed military dictatorship.

Opened as the third Ford plant in Brazil in 1967, three years after the 1964 military coup that toppled the bourgeois-nationalist government of President João Goulart of the Brazilian Labor Party, the plant was part of a massive expansion of industry around São Paulo. This expansion would see the city overtake Rio de Janeiro as Brazil’s largest, amid the immigration of millions of northern workers, who were fleeing poverty and military and paramilitary violence against farmers.

By the late 1970s São Paulo comprised the largest concentration of workers in South America and by far the largest in the newly urban Brazil. The city also became the decisive political force in the country. The influence built up by the union bureaucracy, led by the former metalworkers union leader and first PT president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was channeled into the PT. This served as the party’s main asset in presenting itself to the Brazilian bourgeoisie as the most capable force to stabilize social relations under a capitalist system that had created the most extreme inequality in the world.

With the onset of the slump in industrial production in 2013-2014 and the sharp rise in unemployment in what would become the greatest economic crisis in the country’s history, the ABC region also saw the beginning of the abandonment of the PT by the Brazilian working class. The leading industrial regions in the country, ABC among them, saw a sharp fall in the margin of votes for the party in the 2014 presidential elections, until finally every single PT mayor in the region was voted out in 2016. The fascistic demagogue and ex-army captain Jair Bolsonaro won the region by a wide margin in the 2018 presidential election.

Benefiting from the rejection of the PT, Bolsonaro owed whatever minor popularity he garnered, which is now in free fall, by posing as an opponent of the “pension reform” initially proposed by the PT—which he now endorses while the PT feigns opposition—and being fraudulently portrayed by the press as opposing the PT’s neoliberal policies and privatizations.

To the extent that the unions made economic nationalism and corporatism their stock-in-trade, Bolsonaro was able to strike a populist tone by claiming “China was buying Brazil.” The last stroke came when he demagogically supported the hugely popular May 2018 truckers’ strike, while the PT-controlled unions portrayed it as a right-wing maneuver, isolating the most concentrated sections of the working class from the strike even as auto production was being brought to a standstill for lack of supplies.

The reaction of the unions has exposed that they will deepen their collaboration not only with the companies, but also with the far-right Brazilian government, to which the union bosses cowardly apologized in November after campaigning for PT’s Fernando Haddad as the head of an “anti-fascist” front.

At a time when the common interests of the international working class are starkly and rapidly expressed by cross-border solidarity in demonstrations and strikes—most prominently on the US-Mexico border, and now between French and Algerian workers—the unions refuse to coordinate a struggle between workers at Ford and GM in Brazil, just five kilometers apart. On the contrary, they are pitting workers against those in other states, painting in rosy colors work relations at the impoverished ABC, where contract-hires are paid barely above the minimum wage, saying that Ford is keeping other Brazilian plants open because “ABC workers are too well-paid.”

They make every effort to subordinate workers to one or another fraction of the bourgeoisie, under the guise of “exploiting the government’s contradictions,” in the words of the foremost pseudo-left PT apologists, the Workers’ Cause Party (PCO), or of “potentializing” the conflicts between Bolsonaro and his coup-mongering vice president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão —as proposed by the PT propagandist Gustavo Conde, who reacted with anger to criticism by his readers that the PT was “flirting” politically with Mourão.

Meanwhile, the PT circulated a “message from prison” from Lula to Ford workers, telling them to “put pressure on the government to ban Ford imports”—that is, responding to the downsizing of the company by pitting Brazilian workers against their international class brothers facing the same threats. Two days later, the union chose to meet Vice President General Mourão, instead of Bolsonaro, to discuss mounting such “pressure,” telling the press at the end of the meeting that he was “sensitive and committed to taking the issue to Bolsonaro.”

Meeting workers after his return from Detroit, appearing side-by-side with the PT’s president, Gleisi Hoffmann, the ABC Metalworkers Union president, Wagner Santana, pledged that he would insist, at Hoffmann’s suggestion, that Bolsonaro take the issue to Trump—mimicking the pledge made by the US unions and the Democratic party that they would “work with Trump to generate jobs.”

A last word must be said about the reactionary upper-middle class pseudo-left organizations surrounding the PT and feigning horror at Brazil’s far-right government. All of them blame the working class for the rise of Bolsonaro, portraying workers who rejected the PT as greedy and bigoted evangelical zealots.

This took a particularly virulent form in relation to the Ford closure, with the promotion among these layers of the story that Workers Party presidential candidate Fernando Haddad was booed by workers when he campaigned at the plant. The story went viral on social media, with supposedly “left” middle-class layers sharing comments that workers at Ford “deserved” being thrown onto the unemployment lines because of their “stupidity” in voting for Bolsonaro and being hostile to the right-wing, neoliberal Haddad.

Haddad has denied that he was booed by the Ford workers while campaigning in 2018, and the Piauí magazine also investigated the story and found it untrue.

Nonetheless, such comments flooded pro-PT Facebook pages and Twitter accounts such as those of “Mídia Ninja,” “Jornalistas Livres” and former presidential candidate for the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), Guilherme Boulos.

Exposing how embedded this conception is within the PT’s closest defenders, one of the propagators of the false claim about the Ford workers was the former priest Leonardo Boff, known internationally as one of the “left” proponents of liberation theology and one of the most read pro-PT authors in Brazil. He is also described as Lula’s “religious counselor” in prison.

Boff re-tweeted the false claim that the workers “did not allow Haddad to speak at Ford during the campaign” and that they chanted “mito, mito” (“the legend,” the term used to describe Bolsonaro by his supporters). The fact that this never happened did not stop Boff from continuing: “Now Ford has announced that it is going to shut down. More than 20,000 workers will be affected. If they point their hands like guns (Bolsonaro’s vile campaign gesture) shouting ‘legend’ will the jobs come back?”

Nothing could more clearly expose the profound class hostility of the upper-middle class base of the PT toward the Brazilian working class. The struggle in defense of jobs and living standards and against the threat of dictatorship can be waged only through a complete break with this reactionary bourgeois party and all of its pseudo-left satellites.

US grounds Boeing 737s involved in Indonesian, Ethiopian crashes

Barry Grey

On Wednesday, three days after a Boeing 737 Max 8 commercial jet crashed in Ethiopia, killing all 157 people on board, and governments all over the world had banned the Boeing 737 Max fleet, the United States ended its isolation and announced that it was grounding the planes indefinitely.

President Trump made the announcement Wednesday afternoon, hours after the last holdout besides the US, Canada, announced that it was joining Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America in banning the planes. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau issued his statement after reports surfaced of at least 11 complaints about the recently deployed 737 Max planes having been logged by US professional aviators with the federal Aviation Safety Reporting System between April and December of 2018.

Boeing 737 MAX 9

The position of Boeing and the US carriers that use its 737 Max jets—Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United—backed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that the planes were perfectly safe and should continue flying, had become untenable. Sunday's crash, which occurred six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, was doubly alarming because it appeared to follow the same pattern as the Lion Air crash last October of a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet that went down eight minutes after takeoff from the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia. That disaster likewise killed all passengers and crew, a total of 189 people.

Aviation experts believe the Lion Air jet plunged into the Java Sea after the aircraft gyrated between descents and ascents because an automated flight control system newly installed on the updated 737 model repeatedly pitched the nose of the plane downward and the pilots were unable to override it. After that crash, both Indonesian and US pilots said they had not been told about the new system and had not been trained in its use.

Boeing then announced that it would be adding a software patch to the system and amendments to the training manual for the plane. Those, however, are not due to come online until next month.

The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines said Tuesday that the pilot of doomed Flight 302, a senior aviator with thousands of flying hours logged with the airline, had radioed the control tower shortly after takeoff that he was experiencing "flight control problems" and requested permission to return to the airport.

In his statement Wednesday, Canada's transport minister Garneau said newly received satellite tracking data of the vertical path of the Ethiopian jet at takeoff and corresponding data from the Lion Air crash showed similar “vertical fluctuations” and “oscillations.”

In his announcement later on Wednesday, Trump said the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8s and Max 9s (a longer version of the aircraft employed by United) would begin immediately. “The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern,” he said.

This is a transparent lie, since the Trump administration kept the planes in the air for days after countries around the world began grounding them and banning them from their airspace.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg issued his own statement making similar assertions and ignoring the fact that as of Tuesday evening—when the whole world with the exception of Canada and New Zealand had banned the jets—he was insisting that the planes were perfectly safe and would continue in operation. On Wednesday, he reversed course and said the company had taken the “proactive step” of grounding the 737 Max planes “out of an abundance of caution.”

Trump, who has hailed Boeing and Muilenburg as models of “America First” industrial power, and received praise from the Boeing CEO in return, went out of his way in his announcement to praise the firm. “Boeing is an incredible company,” he said. “They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully they’ll very quickly come up with the answer, but until they do, the planes are grounded.”

The reported complaints about the flight performance of the 737 Max logged onto the federal database by US pilots are highly revealing and troubling. In one, a captain reported an autopilot glitch that caused a nose-down situation, similar to what seems to have occurred in both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.

In another complaint, a first officer reported that the aircraft pitched nose down after the autopilot was engaged during departure. The plane was stabilized when the autopilot was disconnected.

A pilot on a November 2018 flight said it was “unconscionable” that Boeing, the FAA and the unnamed airline allowed pilots to fly without adequate training or documentation. He called the flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient,” and added that part of the plane’s flight system was “not described in our Flight Manual.”

Boeing, which under CEO Muilenburg has been engaged in a ruthless cost-cutting and job-cutting operation and a desperate war for markets and profits against European-based Airbus, introduced the 737 Max series in 2017 to counter Airbus’s more cost-efficient entry to the lucrative mid-range flight market, the A320neo. Boeing claimed that the 737 Max required virtually no new training for pilots who had flown earlier 737 models, making it cheaper for airlines to bring online.

The 737 Max has become the best-selling plane in the company’s 100-year history, accounting for up to 40 percent of the firm’s soaring profits. There are already some 370 of the planes in operation around the world, including over 70 in the US, and 5,000 more on order. Boeing stock, whose price has tripled since the election of Trump in November of 2016, accounts for 30 percent of the 7,000-point rise in the Dow since then.

The biggest US exporter, Boeing exerts immense influence on the US political system. Its political action committee donates large sums to both parties, including among its beneficiaries Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Last year the company spent $15 million in lobbying and employed more than a dozen lobbying firms. The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, is a former Boeing executive.

Government regulation of Boeing and the airline industry as a whole has become little more than a sham after decades of deregulation. The gutting of government controls over the airlines and manufacturers was initiated by the Democratic Carter administration, with the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, a measure promoted by liberal icon Edward Kennedy. Since then, the lifting of controls, carried out in the name of encouraging competition and benefiting the consumer, has resulted in the monopolization of air travel to the point where four major carriers control 80 percent of US air traffic.

Particularly over the past decade, under Bush, Obama and now in an even more overt manner under Trump, federal regulators of the industry have become its vassals and protectors. The current transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, is a right-wing Republican, married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She served for two terms as secretary of labor under George W. Bush, during which time she gutted health and safety agencies such as the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).

In 2005, the FAA introduced a new program whereby aircraft manufacturers like Boeing were allowed to choose their own employees to serve as FAA “designees” charged with certifying the safety of their commercial planes.

“It’s a very cozy relationship,” said Jim Hall, the former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. “The manufacturer essentially becomes both the manufacturer and the regulator, because of the lack of the ability of government to do the job.”

Volkswagen announces thousands of layoffs

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

The German automaker Volkswagen Group has announced thousands of layoffs at its VW and Audi brands. The slashing of up to 7,000 jobs by the world’s second largest automaker is part of the ongoing jobs bloodbath in the global auto industry.

The move by VW follows GM’s announcement of 14,000 job cuts and the closure of five plants in the US, speculation that Ford may cut 25,000 jobs, mostly in Europe, and tens of thousands of job cuts in China by US and Korean-based automakers.

The VW plant in Hannover

The global job-cutting is largely being driven by the powerful financial interests that are pushing car companies to increase returns to investors even as vehicles sales stagnate and companies spend billions on the fierce competition over electric and self-driving cars.

VW’s largest shareholder, Wolfgang Porsche, told reporters at the Geneva Auto Show last week that the company’s production costs are too high, and that the scale of its manufacturing footprint must be re-examined. Porsche said VW and Audi were “not flexible enough” and suggested that certain segments of production could be outsourced to outside contractors.

The financial daily Handelsblatt reported that Volkswagen’s corporate board, headed by CEO Herbert Diess, plans to cut €5.9 billion in annual production costs beginning in 2023. Salaried positions would be cut by 5,000 as part of a broader programme to eliminate 7,000 jobs.

The Frankfurt stock exchange and other global investors have been punishing VW share value because it has not achieved the profit margins of its global competitors. Last year, VW brands’ margin fell to 3.8 percent, down from 4.2 percent, well below the 8 percent profit margins achieved by rivals Toyota and French automaker PSA.

In a call with investors Tuesday, VW CEO Diess said labor costs were “a big concern” and the company’s finance chief Arno Antlitz said the cuts would enable the company to achieve a six percent profit margin by 2022.

In a letter to Audi’s 90,000 employees, division head Bram Schot said, “Audi needs to come to grips with costs…Audi must develop, produce, and do business more efficiently. No topic can be off limits.”

Schot continued, “There is no way to avoid the fact that we must review our employee structure,” saying that not all workers who retire will be replaced. For his part, Wolfgang Porsche demanded that VW roll back on plans to hire all its trainees for full-time positions.

Job and wage cuts are not the only options being considered. The shutdown of entire plants or production sectors is not being ruled out, according to Schot’s letter. “We will integrate projects, take a closer look at the awarding of vehicle production contracts and plant allocation, and we have to optimise plant-specific capacity,” states the letter. The original plan was to build the electric vehicle platform PPE in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm, but this is no longer certain, Schot said.

“We will streamline our production network, optimise its organisation and flexibility, and increase our productivity,” wrote the Audi chief executive without revealing how many jobs would fall victim to this cost-cutting programme.

Far from fighting the layoffs, IG Metall has once again signaled its willingness to collude in the brutal cost-cutting campaign. The works council and corporate board, which includes IG Metall representatives, are preparing a new version of their notorious Future Pact 2016, which led to the destruction of 30,000 jobs around the world, including 23,000 in Germany. The works council and IG Metall not only imposed the attacks on the workforce, but help draft the plans, and they were richly rewarded for it.

According to Bloomberg News, Bernd Osterloh, the long-time IG Metall and VW Works Council official, “signaled support for further cutbacks in principle, stressing a job guarantee until at least 2025 remains in place with any job reductions based on voluntary agreements. He also urged a draft labor pact on retraining employees for software and digital operations, Osterloh told Bloomberg News in an emailed statement.

Peter Mosch, chairman of the Audi works council in Ingolstadt, appealed to the corporate board to come up with a joint strategy to implement the cost-cutting, saying, “We require a common goal to aim at, we have to revive the Audi spirit.”

The background to the drastic and accelerating attacks is the restructuring of the entire auto industry. Shrinking car markets in China, North America and other locations and the immense investments required for developing electric vehicles and digital self-driving cars are driving a new round of mergers and acquisitions, which will cost workers tens of thousands of jobs.

Volkswagen and Ford have been in talks to team up on electric and autonomous vehicles and would “fit together geographically really well and product line-wise,” according to Bill Ford, executive chairman of the US automaker. Speaking at a conference on electric battery storage in Houston Tuesday, the great-grandson of founder Henry Ford said, VW and Ford “both came to the same realization that as big as our balance sheets are, no company can do this alone.”

Just last week, Daimler Benz and BMW announced a partnership to develop self-driving cars due to budgetary constraints. Prior to that, they announced the integration of their car sharing services.

VW workers are also being forced to pay with their jobs for the actions of top VW and Audi executives who oversaw the intentional programming of diesel engines to activate their emission controls only during laboratory emissions testing. VW has been forced to pay €28 billion thus far for manipulating diesel engines, while Audi recently accepted fines of €800 million.

Similar scandals have engulfed Jeep, Volvo, Renault, Hyundai and other automakers, with Fiat Chrysler announcing Wednesday that was recalling 865,000 vehicles after settling claims that it manufactured vehicles that emitted more pollution than legally allowed in the US.

The VW and Audi executives are portraying the savage cost-cutting campaign as an investment in the future. In reality, VW Group made operating profits of €14.2 billion in 2018, a rise from 2017. That year, the company doubled its payouts to wealthy shareholders, including its largest, the Porsche and Piëch families, whose fortunes were first accumulated under the Nazi regime.

While the costs of the diesel scandal and technological developments are being offloaded onto the workforce, wealthy shareholders are taking advantage of these developments to enrich themselves still further.

Things developed similarly following the 2008–09 global financial crisis. The bankers and speculators, who triggered the crisis through criminal activities, are richer than ever thanks to multi-trillion bailout programmes and a flood of credit from the central banks, while the working class, and entire countries like Greece, are left to pay the price.

Record corporate profits side-by-side with stagnating or falling real wages and the proliferation of part-time and precarious employment, including in the auto industry, has led to growing opposition from autoworkers. In the first ten weeks of 2019 alone, Hungarian VW workers have struck, maquiladora auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, revolted against the companies and the unions, Canadian workers conducted wildcat strikes over the closing of GM’s Oshawa, Ontario, assembly plant and in Brazil, Ford workers struck after the announcement of the closure of the São Paulo plant. In the US there is deep opposition to GM’s plant closings and plans by the UAW to use the automakers’ threat to jobs as a hammer to push through a new round of concessions in contracts later this year.

The global assault on jobs requires an internationally coordinated response by autoworkers. This means breaking free from the grip of the IG Metall, the UAW and other nationalist and pro-capitalist unions, and building new organizations of struggle to mobilize the working class to defend its social rights, including the right to a good-paying and secure job. This must be fused with the fight to build a powerful political movement to fight for socialist policies, including the transformation of the giant banks and automakers like VW, Ford and GM into public enterprises, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.

Afghanistan: Prospects of a Political Settlement with the Taliban

Omar Sadr 

Around mid-March, the fifth round of negotiations between the US and the Taliban—the longest in the ongoing series—concluded in Doha, Qatar. In the US’ view, a negotiation that could be considered successful would be one which results in two important outcomes: first, reorganising US-Taliban relations, and second, re-designing the power configuration in Afghanistan through an accommodation of the Taliban in the country’s political framework. The US’ current engagement with the Taliban is anchored in the assumption that the conflict in Afghanistan has reached a military stalemate. In order to justify the abandonment of its long-held narrative of “no negotiation with the Taliban,” the US is struggling to construct a distinction between the Taliban and terrorists.

The current mode of negotiations indicates that the US is ready to accept the Taliban as a part of the political process in Afghanistan. If the current phase of negotiations succeeds, sooner or later, the Taliban should sit with the Government of Afghanistan to draw up a mechanism for the accommodation of the group. However, the answer to this question remains unclear: what are the institutional arrangements for the Taliban’s inclusion in the national politics of the country? Beyond generic rhetoric that the Taliban should be accommodated into the system, so far, there is no systematic analysis on the political mechanisms of the inclusion of the Taliban and on the pros and cons of each arrangement.

A political settlement refers to a negotiated political arrangement between elites on how the power should be distributed and exercised. Irrespective of the stances of the parties with regard to the prospects of settlement, international experiences indicate that there could be four types of institutional arrangements for a political settlement: participation of the insurgents in elections; power-sharing arrangements; agreement on a transitional mechanism, particularly an interim government; and finally, devolution of power from the centre to local administration in a centralised state.

A recent study this author conducted suggests that the prospects of a political settlement with the Taliban look challenging and perplexing at best. A military stalemate is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a positive negotiated settlement. It is less likely that an insurgency such as the Taliban would agree to a power-sharing arrangement or inclusion in the electoral process if the group is deeply immersed in radical ideology and perceives the stalemate as being in its favour. Unlike the US, the Taliban are not in a hurry for a settlement. The current stalemate is not hurting them. On the contrary, the Taliban is enjoying an increasing political clout as the US is in a haste mode. Furthermore, as the Taliban does not recognise the legitimacy of the post-2001 order—which according to them came as a result of the US counter-insurgency polic—they might not agree for participation in elections and power-sharing both at the national and local levels.

With less than five months left for the next round of presidential elections in Afghanistan (which too was postponed from the original 20 April date), the incumbent government is also less likely to accept any settlement other than the inclusion of insurgents in the electoral process. It is understandable that the sustainability and continuation of the current political order in Afghanistan is related to holding regular and timely elections. However, elections might not necessarily lead to an inclusive and stable settlement in a fragile context such as in Afghanistan. The consequences of widespread fraud and irregularities witnessed in the 2014 presidential election and the 2018 parliamentary election are the good examples of this.

The other model involves an agreement on a transitional arrangement, i.e. an interim government—an issue that has been widely discussed in various circles. International experiences show that there could be four types of interim governments:

First, in cases where the insurgents overthrow the state and they promise a revolutionary provisional government. For example, during the Algerian war of independence, the Algerian National Liberation Front established the Provisional Government of Algerian Republic, and in 1974, a group of revolutionary army officers established the Ethiopian Provisional Military Administrative Council. Given the current military stalemate in Afghanistan, the Taliban does not have any chance to overthrow the state and the group lacks democratic ethos to commit to a democratic provisional government.

The second type of situation is one in which the ruling government is forced to step down or loses its democratic legitimacy, and a temporary government of incumbents promises to lead the transition period. For instance, in 1976, Prime Minister Adolfo Saurez led an incumbent interim government to manage the transition to a democratic order in Spain. In Afghanistan, as the incumbent government’s tenure is technically set to end in early May 2019, it might extend its tenure by promising an incumbent interim government. However, it is evident that the Taliban would not accept such an arrangement.

The third possibility is the formation of a power-sharing interim government. An example of this framework was seen in 1993, when President FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela agreed on a power-sharing Transitional Executive Council. However, in Afghanistan’s case, given the rivalry between the Taliban and the incumbent government, both sides reject such a possibility. However, a group of Afghan political elites who attended the February 2019 meeting Moscow meeting with the Taliban are explicitly in favour of forming such a power-sharing interim government.

The last type of interim government is one which is an internationally organised arrangement. A manifestation of this model was seen when the UN Transitional Assistance Group administered a transition during Namibia’s independence. However, given the UN’s failure in administering a successful transition in the early 1990s in Afghanistan, currently, the UN does not have sufficient capacity and does not enjoy legitimacy in eyes of the parties to administer a transition phase successfully. Such an arrangement is possible in Afghanistan if the US and the patrons of the Taliban agree to the formation of a power-sharing interim government.

However, the current political condition is not favourable for establishing an interim government. The failed experience of an interim government in the early 1990s in Afghanistan shows that in order to have a successful interim government, state institutions should remain intact and the insurgency should not completely discount the state. The Taliban have already expressed their discomfort regarding existing state institutions such as the national army. The inclusion of the Taliban will thus intensify the fragility of the system which is already suffering from an imbalance of power.

Moreover, past experiences of peace agreements in Afghanistan demonstrate that implementation and actualisation of such agreements have not been successful, as most of these agreements were limited to elite power-sharing arrangements or power-sharing interim governments and did not cover substantial and structural issues related to lasting peace. With the growing fear that a possible immature agreement with the Taliban may lead to a breakdown of order or loss of recent democratic gains, it is important that efforts aimed at peace and settlements go beyond power-sharing and interim government arrangements, and avoid haste.

Instead, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart wrote in their 2007 paper, a plausible political settlement should work as a tool both for democratisation and statecraft. Hence, it is crucial that the most important issues related to the future system should be settled in the agreement itself rather than postponing that conversation to an unpredictable future. In addition to a settlement on a transitional period, the agreement should also include a new set of ‘rules of the game’, defining all aspects of governing relations. A settlement should not merely be a transitional mechanism for inclusion of the Taliban into the system; rather, it should function as a process to pave the way and implement a series of reforms toward democratisation. The following could be the new ‘rules of the game’:

1. The relationship between the three branches of the government should be reconfigured. At present, the judiciary does not have the capacity to exercise its authority. Its role has been undermined by other institutions, especially the office of the president and affiliated bodies such as the National Security Council. Empowering the judiciary is key to ringing in rule of law.
2. To strengthen the inclusive democratic and participatory process, substantial and tangible checks and balances should be placed and enforced on the executive branch.
3. Local government institutions should be empowered in terms of decision making. A series of decision-making rights should be transferred to the local government.
4. Local authorities, such as provincial governor, should become accountable to the people and hence, the provincial council should get oversight authority.
5. Local authorities should be democratised. The governors should be elected by popular vote.

A comprehensive political settlement is essential for sustaining the democratic order. Of course, the agreement on the status of international troops is different from the agreement on domestic political settlement. However, if the US does not consider these two issues as an integral part of a comprehensive agreement and opts for pulling out its troop without making the Taliban negotiate with the government of Afghanistan on a domestic political settlement, whatever peace that would be achieved would be prone to failure. The status of international troops should act as a guarantor for a full implementation of an agreed political settlement. The fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 and Afghanistan’s descent into the chaos were largely a result of a lack of guaranteed political settlement. Provisions of inclusive and just political settlement are central to the success of a peace agreement.