The US Plan to Partition Syria

Jeff Mackler

During a Jan. 17 Stanford University speech, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the U.S. military will arm, train, finance, and otherwise support—for an indefinite time—a new, 30,000-strong, Kurdish and U.S.-allied Arab nation border force in northeastern Syria. This force in formation, effectively aimed at the partition of Syria, will be backed by at least 5000 U.S. troops installed in the three new and permanent U.S. military bases in Syria. Thousands more troops are stationed on U.S. aircraft carriers and other war ships off Syria’s Mediterranean coast, while thousands more operate from the major U.S. Air force base in Qatar.

Tiller son’s partition speech was a first for a top Trump or Obama administration official. But this former Exxon-Mobile chief essentially stated what U.S. policy has been since 2011 when the Syrian government’s attack on largely peaceful protesters demanding democratic rights and aid for drought-stricken farmers inadvertently provided the U.S. with a pretext for the now seven-year U.S.-orchestrated regime-change imperialist war that has cost the lives of some 500,000 Syrians and displaced nearly half the population.

In 2011 the compliant Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. NATO ally, opened its military bases to the U.S. to facilitate the entry into Syria of some 70,000 ISIS and associated fundamentalist terrorists from some 70 countries seeking the overthrow of the Assad government and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. The New York Times noted this in mid-January 2018, stating, “In 2011 Mr. Erdogan then financed Syrian rebel groups and later allowed foreign recruits to the Islamic State and other jihadist militant groups to stream through Turkey into Syria.”

Assad, as with Libya’s president, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, months earlier, was widely expected to flee for his life, leaving the oil-rich Middle East region open as never before to U.S. domination and exploitation.

Today, with ISIS largely defeated at the hands of the Syrian government army, which lost 50,000 soldiers in this effort, a quarter of its fighting force, aided by its invited allies—Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—the U.S. pretext has all but evaporated. Contrary to the arrogant imperialist braggart, Tillerson, the impending defeat of ISIS forces was qualitatively more a product of the resistance of the Syrian government and its invited allies than it was to the uninvited U.S. invaders and their selective bombing campaigns. Indeed, as long as ISIS forces proceeded south with the aim of capturing the Syrian capital of Damascus, they were allowed to proceed virtually unhindered by U.S.-allied forces.

Likewise, until November 2015, according to the Nov. 16, 2015, New York Times, “The United States refrained from striking the [ISIS] fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact.” Intact for sure, as ISIS until a few years ago pumped oil from the self-same oil fields that the U.S. today seeks to partition under U.S. control in Syria.

Tillerson pulled no punches in stating that neither Iran nor President Bashar al-Assad would be allowed to take over areas that have been “newly-liberated” by U.S. bombing.

Covering Tillerson’s Stanford speech, The New York Times reported on Jan. 17, “Staying in Syria, Mr. Tillerson said, will help ensure that the Trump administration does not repeat what he described as the mistakes of former President Barack Obama, who withdrew troops from Iraq before the extremist threat was doused and failed to stabilize Libya after NATO airstrikes that led to the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.”

In point of fact, the U.S. created “the extremist” threat in Iraq, ISIS, with the objective of overthrowing the government of that country. Similarly, the saturation bombing of Libya that destroyed that nation’s infrastructure also facilitated U.S.-backed mercenaries from Qatar who subsequently invaded and took control of that nation’s capital, Tripoli. Secretary of State John Kerry then proceeded to establish a new Libyan government that soon afterward descended into chaos and corruption, and today is marked by the open institutionalization of Black slavery.

Tillerson’s announcement struck a raw nerve in Turkey, whose air force almost immediately struck at U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria with the aim of preventing the formation of a contiguous region along Syria’s 500-mile east-west border with Turkey. For a few days following Tillerson’s partition announcement, a direct military confrontation between these two NATO allies seemed to be on the agenda, especially in the northeastern city of Manbij, where United States troops have been training and equipping Kurdish forces.

In the same vein, the main brunt of an ongoing Turkish attack has targeted the Syrian northwestern border town of Afrin, which is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Describing the SDF, The New York Times Bureau Chief Anne Barnard wrote on Jan. 24, “The United States military’s official partner in Syria is a militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes Arab and Assyrian fighters but is dominated by the Y.P.G. [People’s Protection Units]. The Americans de-emphasize such details.”

The YPG maintains close ties to the imprisoned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader, Abdullah Ocalan, viewed by Turkey as the devil incarnate because of his longstanding struggle for an independent Kurdish state. The U.S. and Turkey have long designated the PKK as a terrorist organization.

The Times added, “The United States effectively gave a green light to the current Turkish offensive against Afrin, urging restraint but emphasizing that it does not work with the YPG there.”

Further complicating this equation is the fact that the remnants of the previously and still U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army, a loose coalition of so-called moderate anti-Assad rebels, most of whom long ago deserted to ISIS or al-Qaida, are now fighting in alliance with the Turkish Army against the U.S.-organized Kurdish-led forces!

Nawaf Khalil, a former official in the Syrian Kurdish local government, characterized Tillerson’s speech as “a clear American vision on the situation in Syria. … It finally seems like the White House and the Pentagon are on the same page in Syria.” Needless to say, any conception of a future Kurdish state will never take form under the auspices of imperialist troops. The right of self-determination for the long oppressed and geographically dispersed Kurdish people can only be contemplated with the complete withdrawal of all U.S. imperialist troops.

Kurdish illusions in the aims of U.S. imperialism notwithstanding, a Jan. 22, 2018, statement by James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq made the U.S. position unmistakable. “We told the Turks that the Kurds were temporary, tactical, and transactional to defeat ISIS. Now we need them to contain Iran. The whole purpose of this is to split the Russians from the Syrians by saying we’re going to stay on to force a political solution in Syria.”

With the support of Syrian government allies—Russia, Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah—U.S.-backed forces, ISIS included, have today lost control of most of the estimated two-thirds of Syria that they previously occupied. The near-imminent and U.S.-projected fall of the Assad government has not come to pass. In a real sense this turn of events represents a significant defeat for U.S. imperialism, its NATO allies and associated “coalition.”

Today, the Trump/Tillerson threats to establish a long-term military presence in Syria are nevertheless aimed at extracting as many concessions regarding Syria’s future as the present relationship of forces allow. The overt conquest of Syria is today on U.S. imperialism’s back burner. In its stead will be the ongoing United Nations-backed “negotiations” in Geneva on the one hand and the Russian-sponsored negotiations in the Russian resort town of Sochi on the other.

Here, the U.S. hopes to achieve, at least in part, what it could not achieve on Syria’s battlefields. This includes perhaps an agreement for a future Syrian election process wherein President Assad will agree to eventually step down and perhaps to an associated agreement for greater Kurdish autonomy in parts of northern Syria, an eventuality that the Assad government has at least nominally embraced. Undoubtedly, control over Syria’s oil fields and future pipeline routes will be high on imperialism’s agenda as well as inclusion of pro-U.S. forces in a future reconstituted Syrian government.

Syria’s historic right to self-determination, mistakenly thought to be extinguished by significant portions of the “left,” has today been restored, at least in part. The overt conquest of Syria by U.S. imperialism and its allies in all their varied manifestations has been thwarted, but a U.S.-backed occupation will undoubtedly be used to extract future concessions.

The central responsibility of the U.S. and worldwide antiwar movement today is to mobilize in the streets to demand U.S Out Now! Under these conditions—that is, without a U.S. imperialist/colonial presence—will the Syria people best be situated to effectively deal with their own capitalist rulers.  

Living in the Capitalists’ Casino

David Griscom

The stock market, for all of its seeming mystery, is more of an emotional barometer for the rich than a reflection of material production. Abstracted from the lived experiences of those it exploits, it reflects the jubilation and depression of the wealthy. On Monday, the Dow dropped 1,600 points the largest point decline in one day in history. The historic stock market dip was primarily caused by the news that wages had improved slightly for workers. You would think that rising wages would be something they investors would celebrate, justifying their long-time trickle-down promises. Instead, they panicked clutching their pocketbooks. Why? Because the capitalists know the logic of the game: suppress wages, make profit. Despite the claims of wonks and centrists in the capitalist’s casino, when we win, they lose.

In one day, all of the Dow’s gains from 2018 disappeared. The NASDAQ did not fare much better. The VIX rate, which monitors market volatility, jumped 17 points. For comparison, the VIX rate only jumped 10 points after the Brexit shock. It is unclear whether or not the drop will reverberate into other markets, but the negative reaction of the market to slightly improved conditions for workers is worrying enough.

One of the largest fears of investors is that increased wages mean that the Federal Reserve will likely raise the rates it charges banks for loans. This crash is an excellent example of the fact that the American economic system celebrates when workers suffer and convulses when workers win gains.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that sparked the crisis showed a meager improvement for workers averaging around .09 cents an hour. The pessimism of the market in reaction to this news exposes the rot in our system: wage gains for workers are seen as a bad sign for the economy. Despite the altruistic claims of Democrats who line their pockets with corporate money, Wall Street will always react badly to increased conditions for the poor, unless there is an opportunity to profit from them in some way.

The “lender of last resort,” the Federal Reserve, is much more interested in reducing the rate of inflation than increasing the share of wealth enjoyed by workers. Rather than encourage policies from major financial institutions that would benefit the vast majority of Americans, our government has allowed the financial institutions to make a market out of poverty, trading the large sums on the growing debt of the working class. In our immoral system, the degradation of the worker is seen as a sign of a healthy economy, while benefits for the working class as are seen as a detriment.

The fundamental contradiction of the neoliberal era is the rate of increase in productivity, which has exploded, while compensation for the productivity has remained stagnant. According to the Economic Policy Institute, productivity has grown 5.9 times faster than wages. People are working more and earning less, but profits aren’t disappearing. Instead, the concentration of wealth at the top has exploded. The extra money has fueled a jubilant financial market that is further abstracted from the lives of most people. This status quo is threatened by any material gains for the working class. The pages of the NYT and the Wall Street Journal are littered with screeds against universal healthcare and minimum wage increases. A less desperate population won’t toil away into the new drudgery of contract work.

In addition to poor wages and conditions, there has been a massive accumulation by a few companies into new markets; the Uberization of food, laundry, and delivery just to name a few. While these companies capture huge parts of the market, more Americans need multiple jobs to survive and are forced into contract work. Americans are entering the “gig economy” to pay off medical, educational, and credit debt, creations of the financial class.

No longer confined to normal business hours, we are free to toil all the time. No longer confined to an office we can work wherever we chose. The desperation of workers takes a different form from the drudgery of the factory, but the long hours and the reduction of life to labor power for capitalists to exploit continues. The worker has been removed from the factory; the world is now our factory.

The technocratic impulse to use stock indexes to tell us about the state of our society is misguided. What is captured in these measures is the success of the ruling class to sell themselves on themselves — and they love to sell to themselves.

Take the new favorite game of roulette popular on Wall Street: trading derivatives tied to VIX. Simply put, VIX is “the stock market’s fear gauge” that monitors the volatility in the market. Its first iteration began in 1973, but its current form was introduced around the late 1980s. In 2004, the Chicago Board Options Exchange offered futures contracts on the index exclusively to traders, but in 2009 ETFs (exchange-traded funds) were created that were tied directly to VIX rates. These became easily accessible to general traders and the public. VIX was an easy bet in the era of central bank subsidies and bailouts and quickly became one of the most traded 34th in the ranking of US shares.

Now, to make money trading on VIX you are betting that market volatility will continue to decrease. For historical context, the VIX rate always remained low up until major financial crisis. The VIX rate was low up until the dotcom bubble and the Asian market crisis in 1995. It also reached new lows before the 2006 financial crisis. But since trading financial products directly tied to the VIX rate was not popular then we do not know what its effects on the market will be after Monday’s crash.

A few days after its eruption, the crisis seems to have avoided the credit markets and major banks. If the crisis does spread, there will be larger consequences. Still, even if it does not spread we should be worried. The VIX speculation is only one of the major schemes that Wall Street is tied too. Wall Street is already lobbying to repeal the meager protections put into place after the Great Recession (that it helped write). If we are not vigilant the next crisis could be much worse. This, of course, will be hard to do, with only our enemies in power.

The 2008 crisis is a reminder that a stock market collapse is not necessarily good for the working class. But as we have seen, the recovery of Wall Street is not good for the working class either. The economic system is designed to hold the majority down and it sees even a slight improvement to live of the many as a threat to the few. Reform and regulation without a commitment to addressing the fundamental contradiction of economic life will not last. The capitalist casino is always creating new games, and they write the rules.

While the working class does not trade on Wall Street, the indebtedness of most Americans and the unequal distribution of property brings us too close to their games. Financial crises devastate the poor, eradicating their savings and devaluing whatever assets they have. While a portfolio may drop for an investor, the real cost of irresponsible financial markets is increased unemployment and a lack of access to capital for the middle class. Until money and power are redistributed in this society, we all are living in the rigged capitalist casino. It’s time to rewrite the rules.

The Myth of Iran

Andrew Day

There are two Irans – one mythical, one historical.

According to the myth, Iran is a global pariah, an unmitigated menace to its population, a foe to friends of peace and progress – terror itself. This implacable nemesis of democratic ideals flouts treaties and norms in its psychotic quest for apocalyptic weaponry. America’s role in this mythology is Herculean: standing up to the Persian bully in defense of popular government, the rule of law, and global peace.

In the U.S., there is a deep, bipartisan consensus concerning Iran’s monstrosity. It was thus a rare diplomatic breakthrough when, after twenty months of negotiations, the P5+1 and Iran produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The agreement is straightforward: The West lifts sanctions and recognizes Iran’s right to enrich uranium; Tehran reduces extant nuclear stockpiles and caps enrichment at a level far below weapons-grade uranium. So far, Iran has held up its end of the bargain, filling centrifuges with concrete, shipping “dual use” materials to Russia, and allowing the IAEA to verify compliance.

Nevertheless, the JCPOA is in danger, because President Trump seems determined to destroy this “worst deal ever.” His hostile rhetoric has already undermined the treaty, since lending institutions are growing anxious that the U.S. will ramp up sanctions, robbing Iran’s economy of badly needed foreign investment. Among foreign policy planners and analysts, animosity towards Iran continues barely abated. Consequently, opinion leaders have been reluctant to denounce Trump’s antagonistic posture.

The mythical Iran looms over and distorts public debate, not as a legitimate nation-state to diplomatically engage, but as a monster to tame and, ultimately, to vanquish. The nuclear accord’s existential weakness results from this unstable normative foundation in U.S. discourse. President Obama portrayed the agreement as an opportunity for Iran to rejoin the international community, and emphasized that new restrictions would block Iran from weaponizing. This framing reaffirmed the false image of Iran as a rogue state with clandestine plans to build nuclear weapons.

To understand the actual logic underlying the accord, one must look to recent history. In 1953, the CIA deposed the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh, his comeuppance for nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. The U.S. supported Mossadegh’s replacement, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an unpopular autocratic ruler. In 1979, revolutionary forces coalesced to overthrow his dictatorship. Though the revolution comprised a wide ideological spectrum, the Ayatollah Khomenei was able to purge left-wing elements and consolidate power. The Islamic Republic of Iran was born.

Since 1979, the U.S. has punished Iran’s recalcitrance. In the 1980s, Iraq waged a devastating war of aggression against Iran with U.S. backing, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons left a persistent scar in Iran’s national psyche. Today Iran is encircled by U.S. military might, and recently witnessed U.S. invasions of its eastern and western neighbors. Unfortunately, even relatively dovish Democrats are unwilling to see this interventionism from Tehran’s perspective.

An adept manager of empire, President Obama pursued détente with Iran because he determined the U.S. should refocus from Central to East Asia. But unless the U.S. works to repair relations with Iran, the JCPOA only kicks the nuclear canister down the road. The accord extends Iran’s “breakout time” – the estimated time between initiation and completion of a weapons program – but it does not automatically increase trust and understanding. Washington seems unlikely to use this crucial time to reconstitute U.S. – Iran relations in a more stable, peaceful direction. It is time for concerned citizens to join the debate.

We should push back against the myth of Iran, highlighting Iran’s compliance with the NPT, its record of non-aggression against other nation-states, its right to peaceful nuclear energy, and its ongoing cooperation with the world’s most intrusive inspections regime. We should point out that U.S. intelligence agencies have determined Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. Though the “war on terror” has caused misery and chaos, we should remind our compatriots that Iran has helped the U.S. fight the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS. When pressed to offer a long-term solution to nuclear proliferation, we should answer that Iran has long supported a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, a proposal that the U.S. would be wise to encourage. Finally, we must sustain opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban, which unfairly targets Iranians and corrodes cultural interchange.

Interventionists assume their own narrow agenda – destroying the JCPOA and overthrowing the “mad mullahs” – coincides with the Iranian people’s. But most Iranians want dialogue – not conflict – with the West. When U.S. politicians threaten bellicose actions, they embolden Iran’s hardliners and undermine its moderates. To escape this cycle of hate and paranoia, we must do our part to attenuate pervasive myths of empire, civilize American discourse, and improve the possibilities for peace.

Living With Truth Decay

Geoff Dutton

“Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it”

— Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984. p. 245).

In the 20^th-century but still fun party game called Telephone, people sit in a circle and someone whispers a phrase or sentence to the person to the left, who whispers it to their left, around the clock, until it reaches the original speaker, who annunciates what s/he sent and received. The final utterance may make sense, but it is almost never the one sent and is often complete nonsense. This is one form of truth decay.

Truth is a relatively scarce commodity. Science progresses by disproving theories, not proving them (that only happens in mathematics). In the real world, everything you know to be true just hasn’t been disproved yet, so it’s a good idea to stay tuned.

Not only is the amount of truth finite, it doesn’t grow very fast. Facts and opinions, on the other hand do, thanks to an intensive bombardment of truth-deficient information. Factoids, received wisdom and regurgitated opinions about everything imaginable rain upon us like nuclear fallout. Attempts to verify facts that swim in oceans of discourse finds them as slippery as eels. Truths decay like echoes do, sloping toward unintelligibility inside our echo chambers.

Fishing for evidence floating in the Net is far from compiling facts in a controlled empirical study and—contrary to the scientific method—is likely done to support a hypothesis, not to disprove one. In any event, facts are not truths. Truth rests on facts, vetted as dispassionately as possible. For instance, it’s a fact that mean global CO2 in the atmosphere officially was 404.55 PPM at the end of 2016 and 406.75 one year later, or one-half a percent more. Here are other fun facts about that:

Legend: PPM of CO2 in air trapped in Antarctic ice cores, 1000-2000 AD (Etheridge et al.)

You can fit an exponential curve to the facts in this graph. Exponential growth never ends well. That’s not a fact; it’s a truth based on the fact that growth rates can’t become infinite.

There are people who deny these are facts. There are other people who say they’re no big deal. Still others take them seriously while not admitting any specific import. And then there are those, probably most of humanity, who believe and may fear them but absolve themselves of any responsibility or them. They are all truth-impaired.

Dubious facts and regurgitated opinions about climate change and everything imaginable surround us. This disinformation explosion makes it harder and harder to identity verities embedded in what is mostly noise. Right, left or center doesn’t matter; when compadres spin online threads, their self-reinforcing feedback rises to a shriek like a microphone pointing at a loudspeaker.

It might help to tap into our opposition’s telephony and vice versa; lurk on their news outlets and blogs, not to troll them but to discern what truths and biases bend their opinions. Such an exercise can be really painful, I admit. It is hard for me to scroll through articles on alt-right sites like Breitbart News that spew venom at libtards, progressives, immigrants, blacks, you name it. But ever so often the shoe fits, as when kicking at Wall Street banks. The Left has no corner on truth, even if its facts and logic are better. In an essay on Medium about Canadian academic Jordon Peterson, a self-described rational social critic whose manipulative language comforts alt-rightists, Aaron Huertas asserts (emphasis his):

political debates aren’t really about who has the most or best facts or even who has the most consistent logic. Politics is about which facts are considered relevant to a debate and what kind of logic we should follow in creating, following and enforcing laws.

In other words, facts (and arguments based on them) are more likely to be perceived as true by those exposed to them if they feel they are relevant to the issue at hand and seem actionable. And besides relevance, people filter facts in all sorts of ways, not the least of which are their sources. If you happen to believe that climate scientists are a grant-grubbing cabal seeking only to advance their own careers, very little that they put forward will persuade you that they know of what they speak or even believe it. You might even call findings like the above “fake data.”

It would help some if we had more scientists and citizens scrutinizing facts diligently without jumping to conclusions. A measure of skepticism is a good thing, as is watching out for confirmation bias. But objectivity is a scarce currency, especially for those with a dog in the fight or who believe in revealed truth, whether from holy books or school curricula or incessant propaganda; the quasi-theological belief, for example, that a divine invisible hand is poised to deliver them from satanic bureaucracies to the promised land of free markets. Is it too much to ask them to study the theologies of market manipulators? Have they not witnessed what belief in survival of the greediest hath wrought?

Investment bankers, fast traders, futures speculators, and hedge fund honchos know how to game the system and have the algorithms, lobbyists, and offshore accounts to prove it. Insulated from lesser beings by their wealth, influence, and privilege, incessantly striving to be the richest kid on the block, greed’s depredations hardly impinge on their umwelts. Anyone who complains about falling behind is simply a sore loser, and that’s the truth.

While the fog of self-interest is a major factor, some truth decay is definitely deliberate, especially when things get politicized. Take the dueling Republican and Democratic memos from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding Russiagate. Senators of both parties heard the same testimony and looked at the same documents, but apparently (only the GOP’s has been released) the facts they found significant are completely different. One might call this classic confirmation bias were the whole proceeding no more than a Kabuki charade whose mesmerizing purpose is to obscure how the public’s business gets done.

Of course, determining “which facts are considered relevant to a debate” is itself irrelevant when debate really isn’t about determining truth, as is generally the case in politics. If one side’s facts can’t be squarely challenged they can simply be deemed irrelevant or ignored by the other. In The Doubter’s Companion, “A dictionary of aggressive common sense,” John Ralston Saul defines Facts as “tools of authority,” elaborated as:

Facts are supposed to make truth out of a proposition. The trouble is that there are enough facts around to prove most things. They have become the comfort and prop of conventional wisdom; the music of rational technocracy; the justification for any sort of policy, particularly as advanced by special-interest groups, expert guilds and other modern corporations. Confused armies of contradictory facts struggle in growing darkness. Support ideological fantasies. Stuff bureaucratic briefing books.

He then quotes from Diderot’s definition:

You can divide facts into three types: the divine, the natural and man-made. The first belongs to theology; the second to philosophy and the third to history. All are equally open to question.

Truths are no longer seen as propositions that numerous minds converge upon in the course of assimilating facts from sustained observation and controlled experiments. Except for true believers who trust in once and forever divine revelations, the search for truth has now been almost fully automated. Today’s truths are spat out from search engines and algorithms grinding up big data. They are the stuff that sponsors of telephone surveys and focus groups “scientifically” reduce opinions to. Unlike truths, opinions are fickle things with brief half-lives. Were they not, the billions spent on marketing and election campaigns would be utterly wasted.

And so, to the extent that opinions can be swayed, what their holders hold true mutates in sympathy. Get used to it; we’re no longer in an age of information scarcity and revealed truths. Technology’s exponential asymptotic frenzy overloads our circuits with messages, events, interactions, facts and opinions constantly at odds and competing for our loyalties, causing the temperature of discussion to rise. In other words, more information makes us more riled up and confused. That and testosterone poisoning.

At the same time, and partly for the same reasons, science is piling up facts as never before, some of which trickle into truths when they support or undermine theories, even if most go to support grant applications. Achieving a scientific consensus takes contention and debate and a willingness to abandon theories when new evidence indicates things aren’t what they seem.

Like scientific ones, political truths have half-lives, and the more radioactive they are, the faster they decay. It doesn’t make sense to insist that an unstable isotope is a certain substance when it’s on the verge of becoming something else. Perhaps partisans should stop labeling themselves and their rivals long enough to let whatever truths they hold transmute into more stable substances that can be worked with.

In armed conflicts, truth decay can lead to mission creep, especially when the underlying premises are shaky. As Tuchman’s quote, referring to US policy regarding Vietnam (for which one could readily substitute Afghanistan) illustrates, unfortunate facts on the ground rarely erode confidence in value propositions and their ultimate payoffs. Instead of admitting error, cutting losses and making restitution, the protagonist doubles down. It is rare that a nation, leader, or individual is big enough to own up to bad judgments, much less to admit that they were based on false premises.

The persistence of human error that bends not to evidence of truth decay seems to have been with us for all of recorded history. It’s a serious problem that seems to have no lasting solutions. People don’t handle doubt well, especially self-doubt, and are hardwired to ignore obvious evidence that what they believe just ain’t so. Confirmation bias stands before truth like a nightclub bouncer, never admitting troublemaking thoughts. And truths that manage to slip past tend to get seated at tables in the back reserved for Cognitive Dissonance and told it’s wonderful to have you here. Enjoy the show. No talking please.

Afghan Civilians Keep Paying the Price for the So-Called War On Terror

Rohullah Naderi

One of the stated objectives of coalition forces led by the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in 2001 was to overthrow the Taliban from power and help Afghans form a democratic and relatively stable government. The main objective of getting rid of the extremist group – the Taliban, was to defeat terrorism spearheaded by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda was purported to have bases in Afghanistan.

Since the main focus of the coalition forces was eliminating terrorism, it is worthwhile to analyze this objective after this 17-year campaign and find out what progress has been made in achieving this goal. I will talk about civilian causalities – the aim of this article – and its impact on Afghans and the American strategies of winning hearts of minds and defeating terrorism. The importance of talking about civilian casualties is relevant because the campaign to fight terrorism continues to produce significant civilian casualties. Recently the Taliban attacked Kabul’s downtown killing 105 people. Reuters reported the U.S. military authorities are opening an investigation about a widely circulated video in which an American soldier is firing into a civilian truck in Afghanistan. Afghan civilians are being targeted by its sworn enemy the Taliban. And ironically by its partner, the U.S., who should be helping their government to protect them and defeat the Taliban. It is truly a cath-22 situation for the Afghan people.

The Afghan war is now America’s longest in history. It just entered its 17^th year. With President Trump’s announcement that he will increase the number of American forces in Afghanistan, the war will be protracted for years to come. There seems no end in sight. To help us understand the progress made by the American forces in defeating terror in Afghanistan, the Watson Institute in Brown University has done an exhaustive study of the campaign and produced a detailed report. According to study, the so-called war on terror has not yielded the desired result of eliminating terrorist threats. When former U.S. President George W Bush launched the “War on Terror” to much fanfare and cheers, the target country was only Afghanistan. Now, after 17 years of war in Afghanistan, the conflict has expanded. In fact, it has spread to 76 more countries touching 39 percent of this planet.

In Afghanistan, the so-called war on terror has wreaked havoc. It has turned the entire country into a battle field where killings, explosions, and bombardments have become the norm. Air strikes are ramping up without any end, causing painful collateral damage in the process. Despite America’s 17-year campaign, the Taliban has gained more territory in Afghanistan. Now, about 43 percent of the country’s districts are either under Taliban control or being contested by the group. Overall, the Taliban threaten 70 percent of Afghanistan. Very sadly, ISIS –  while defeated in Syria and Iraq, is spreading fast in the eastern part of Afghanistan. This brutal terror group is a serious danger to the safety of religious minorities in Afghanistan who adhere to the Shiite sect of Islam. The group has already proved its cowardice and brutality by targeting Shiite places of worship, and by killing large numbers of Shiite Muslims. The group is a threat to the stability, religious tolerance and social fabric of the country. Up till now, except warnings about the group and its intentions from security officials, we have not seen any clear or effective strategy from the government in combating it. What is more worrisome is the mushrooming of more terror groups in the region. According to a latest report from the Pentagon there are “more than 20 terrorist or insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” These outfits will surely further push both Afghanistan and Pakistan toward instability and chaos.

The so-called war on terror has been detrimental for the U.S. too. It is extremely costly with a staggering price tag of $ 5.6 trillion. The cost has fiscally strained American tax payers and has contributed to a federal debt that has reached $ 20 trillion. This cost is increasingly unsustainable at a time when American infrastructure is crumbing and in a desperate need of renovation, inequality is on the rise, and with student loan debt crossing one trillion dollars. Health insurance premiums are going up, putting the health of many Americans in danger. Incomes are stagnating and every fiscal year there is a budget deficit. In the light of these developments, the price tag for the so-called war on terror seems illogical and wasteful. The money spent on the failed war on terror could have been used to improve the standard of living of Americans by taking care of their education, health and job security. Militarily, the war has been costly as well. Those soldiers who return from battle-fields are experiencing mental and psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This mental health condition, which is triggered by the horrifying experiences of war, has become a huge challenge for the families of the veterans with PTSD and for the Veteran Administration (VA). The VA is in disarray. Its bureaucracy is ineffective and is ranked the least attractive place to work in the federal government. The VA not only has to cope with the flood of patients who seek treatment and sometimes die because of long waits, but also with 20 suicides per day among veterans.

The Tragedy of Civilian Causalities

For Afghans one of the drawbacks of the so-called war on terror has been the significant rate of civilian causalities. This tragedy cost former Afghan President Hamid Karzai his relationship with the Americans. The issue put Karzai in confrontation with American/NATO military operations. American/NATO forces were claiming they were targeting militants and terrorists hiding among civilians. But collateral damage was unavoidable. Karzai has countered U.S. anti-terror claims by pointing out that terrorists are not hiding among Afghan civilians. Terror is coming from beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Countering American Islamophobic stereotypes, he famously declared that anyone wearing beard and turban was not automatically a terrorist. Civilian causalities also dented Karzai’s image as he was seen as soft and compromising before American/NATO forces. Afghans thought he was not as tough as he should be in addressing the issue of civilian causalities. Undoubtedly, it has also made Afghans quite angry and frustrated. How long are they supposed to pay the price of the so-called war on terror? And the price has become extremely costly. Last year alone there was a 50 percent rise in civilian casualties from American air strikes compared with same period in 2016. According to a U.N. investigation, in 2017, at least 205 civilians were killed and 261 wounded by air strikes. Afghan air forces were also involved in the strikes. Terrorist groups such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS have targeted Afghans. Their objective is to spread terror and kill. But coalition forces are supposed to target terror groups and protect civilians. Instead the coalition forces kill Afghans too. This dichotomy is incomprehensible for Afghans. The label of a war on terror does not represent the reality on the ground. This unjust killing does not help win the hearts and minds of Afghans. They need protection and support, particularly intelligence support. They want their country to be free of proxy war, regional competitions, and warfare. They need political support to fight terrorism, which stems from outside of Afghanistan.

By skimming through the 17-year-old “war on terror” in Afghanistan, any observer can easily conclude that the strategy was defective. It has not achieved its stated objective. On the contrary, the objective has become blurred. After all these years, any critical observer will pose this question: what is the war in Afghanistan all about? If the strategy was achievable, and with all the resources at the United States’ disposal, the stated objective of dismantling terrorism should have been achieved by now. But terror has not declined. It has become more deadly, leading to more casualties and destroying more lives. The U.S. military strategy of pacifying the Taliban and eliminating terrorism has not worked. It has killed more civilians than terrorists.

The only way to solve the menace of terror in Afghanistan is to look for a political solution. Terrorism is a tactic used by terror groups to achieve their political objectives. So, one needs to address the basic cause of the tactic, identify the causes driving terrorist violence, understand them and come up with more effective solutions. Political will, strong resolve, and honesty are needed to succeed. Sadly, these factors are missing from the onset from the so-called war on terror.

Why ‘Russian Meddling’ is a Trojan Horse

Rob Urie

Prior to the 2016 presidential election, if one were to ask what single act could seal a new Cold War with Russia, align liberals and progressives with the operational core of the American military-industrial-surveillance complex, expose the preponderance of left-activism as an offshoot of Democratic Party operations and consign most of what remained to personal invective against an empirically dangerous leader, consensus would likely have it that doing so wouldn’t be easy.

The decision to blame Russian meddling for Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss was made in the immediate aftermath of the election by her senior campaign staff. Within days the received wisdom amongst Clinton supporters was that the election had been stolen and that Donald Trump was set to enter the White House as a pawn of the Russian political leadership. Left out was the history of U.S. – Russian relations; that the largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who didn’t vote and that domestic business interests substantially control the American electoral process.

Graph: The Democrats’ choice to blame external forces, e.g. Russian meddling, for their electoral loss in 2016 ignores evidence of that none-of-the-above is the people’s choice. The largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who chose not to vote. In contrast to the received wisdom in political consultant circles, choosing not to vote is a political act. The U.S. has the lowest voter turnout in the ‘developed’ world for a reason. Source: electproject.org.

More than a year later, no credible evidence has been put forward to establish that any votes were changed due to ‘external’ meddling. As the Intercept has reported, since the election progressive candidates seeking public office have been systematically subverted by establishment Democrats in favor of those with connections to big-money donors. And the Democratic Party leadership in congress just voted to give Mr. Trump expanded spying powers with fewer restraints. Congressional Democrats are certainly behaving as if they believe Mr. Trump was duly elected. And more to the point, they are supporting his program.

The choice of Russia would seem bizarre if not for the history. Residual propaganda from the first Cold War— itself largely a business enterprise that provided ideological cover for American imperial incursions, had it that substantive grievances against the American government, in the form of protests, were universally the product of ‘external’ enemies intent on sowing discord to promote their own interests. This slander was used against the Civil Rights movement, organized labor, anti-war protesters and the counterculture of the 1960s.

Therefore, the choice by the Clintonites to invoke a new Cold War by bringing Russia into the American electoral mix is not without a past. Students of history may recall that in the early 1990s Mikhail Gorbachev was given assurances by senior members of George H.W. Bush’s administration that NATO would not be expanded to Russia’s border in exchange for Russia’s help re-integrating East and West Germany. It was Bill Clinton who unilaterally abrogated these assurances and moved nuclear-armed NATO to Russia’s border.

In 2013 the Obama administration ‘brokered’ (Mr. Obama’s term) a coup in the former Soviet state of Ukraine that ousted the democratically elected President to install persons favorable to the interests of Western oligarchs. At the time Hillary Clinton had just vacated her post as Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State to prepare for her 2016 run for president, but her lieutenants, including Victoria Nuland, were active in coordinating the coup and deciding who the new ‘leadership’ of Ukraine would be.

An analogy would be if Russia moved troops and weaponry to the Mexican border with the U.S. after giving assurances that it wouldn’t do so and then engineered a coup (in Mexico) to install a government friendly to the interests of the Russian political leadership. One needn’t be sympathetic to Russian interests to understand that these are provocations. Given U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, the provocations seem more reckless than ‘tough.’ Then consider Mr. Obama’s, later Trump’s, move to ‘upgrade’ the U.S. nuclear arsenal toward ‘tactical’ use.

This is to suggest that it certainly makes sense that the Russian political leadership would want to keep American militarists, a/k/a the Clintons and their neocon ‘crazies,’ out of White House. But as of now, the evidence is that the Russians changed no votes in the 2016 election. As far as inciting dissent— the charge that protests were organized by Russian ‘interests,’ not only does this reek of prior misdirection by the FBI and CIA, but there is no evidence that any such protests had an impact on the outcome of the 2016 election.

Given Mr. Trump’s belligerent (unhinged) rhetoric toward North Korea, if enhancing geopolitical stability was the Russians’ goal, Mr. Trump must be a disappointment. Unfortunately for Mr. Trump’s critics (among whom I count myself), there is a lot of ‘theory’ from American think tanks that supports crazy as a strategy. And it was after Mr. Trump’s provocative posture toward North Korea became widely known that senior Democrats voted to give him additional NSA powers with fewer restrictions.

The most cynically brilliant outcome of the ‘blame Russia’ campaign has been to neuter left activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump’s administration approximates that in Mr. Obama’s and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton’s. If the problem is Donald Trump, then the solution is ‘not Trump.’ However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political outcomes, how would electing ‘not Trump’ bring about resolution?

As it is, within days of the 2016 election Mr. Trump, his supporters plus the political opponents of Mrs. Clinton were recast as stooges of the Kremlin. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had required loyalty oaths from their stalwarts. But even a loyalty oath wouldn’t prove that one isn’t a stooge of the Kremlin. And the larger problem with the theory (of Russian meddling) is that the U.S. electoral system was already thoroughly corrupted by economic power.

As students of the scientific method know, you can’t ‘prove’ a negative. Condoleezza Rice used this knowledge in 2003 to sell the George W. Bush administration’s calamitous war against Iraq through the charge that the proof that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing WMD program is that he hadn’t handed over his WMDs. As history has it, Mr. Hussein couldn’t hand over his WMDs because he didn’t have any to hand over. How then would critics of Mrs. Clinton ‘prove’ they weren’t / aren’t acting on behalf of foreign interests?

The answer lies with Democratic Party loyalists. Much as Bush – Cheney supporters were impervious to logical and evidentiary challenges to the rationales given for the war against Iraq, Clintonites believe what they believe because they believe it. For those with an interest and some knowledge of empirical research, read the myriad articles touting ‘proof’ of Russian meddling and find a single instance where such proof is provided. Or with an eye toward not being the half of Republicans who still believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, bring the proof forward if it exists.

Here is the disclaimer taken from the National Intelligence Estimate (link here).

The National Intelligence Estimate, initially claimed to be based on input from 17 intelligence agencies, later reduced to selected representatives from three of the agencies (NSA, CIA and FBI), provides no proof for claims of Russian meddling and states quite openly that it is conjecture. Amongst these agencies, one (NSA) is known for illegally spying on Americans and lying about it to congress, the second (CIA) provided fraudulent ‘evidence’ to drag the U.S. into a calamitous war against Iraq where it ran illegal torture camps and the third (FBI) has such a checkered history that is was called ‘Gestapo’ by former U.S. president Harry Truman.

Here is James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, lying to congress about NSA spying. Here is Trevor Timm in the Columbia (University) Journalism Review explaining the many ways former head of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden has lied to congress and the American people. Here is a brief history of COINTELPRO and FBI attempts to disrupt and discredit the Civil Rights movement. At the time that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was accusing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist (link above), the term approximated being an agent of Russia.

(Here is a compendium of links related to claims made in this piece: Promise by U.S. that NATO wouldn’t expand to surround Russia. Bill Clinton expands NATO to Eastern Bloc to surround Russia. Barack Obama admits U.S. role in Ukraine coup. James Clapper committing perjury. Victoria Nuland discusses overthrowing the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installing U.S. puppets. Backstory of CIA and Robert Sheer that supports argument Propornot is government operation with ties to Ukrainian fascists.)

There is circumstantial evidence that the first list of ‘Russian-linked’ websites published by the ‘credible’ media, that of Propornot published in the Washington Post (in their ‘Business’ section) to which a disclaimer was subsequently added, was the work of Ukrainians with links to the CIA. The Propornot website (link above) is worth visiting to get a sense of how implausible the whole enterprise is. On it former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, is listed prominently as a puppet of the Kremlin. And deep-research political website Washington’s Blog made the honor roll as well.

More recently, the New York Times cited the German Marshall Fund as an authority on Russian meddling. The German Marshall fund (U.S.) is headed by Karen Donfried, a former Obama Administration official and operative for the National Intelligence Council. The National Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence. Here (again) is James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, lying to congress about NSA spying. Derek Chollet, Executive Vice President of the fund, is the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Obama administration and a senior member of Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff.

The question for the Left is why liberals and progressives would align themselves with Hayden, Clapper, the FBI, CIA and NSA, and suspect organizations like Propornot and the German Marshall Fund when most have spent their entire existences trying to undermine and shut down the Left? The (near-term) cynical brilliance of the Democrats’ strategy is through revival of the Cold War frame of national interests that was always a cover for imperial business schemes. As the Intercept articles (links above) have well- uncovered, this is all just business for the Democrats anyway. Can you say class warfare?

Assuming for a moment that not everyone is playing the Democrats’ one-dimensional checkers, if the Russian political leadership really intended to ‘undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order,’ as the NIE puts it, it is doing Mrs. Clinton a disservice to suggest that she wasn’t up to the job. From the Clintons’ 1994 Crime Bill to deregulating Wall Street to support for George W. Bush’s calamitous war against Iraq to the U.S. / NATO destruction of Libya, Mrs. Clinton has ‘undermine(d) the U.S.-led liberal democratic order’ just fine.

Likely not considered when the Russian meddling hypothesis was originally put forward is what happens next? The initial charge that America’s ‘sacred democratic tradition’ was soiled when the Russian political leadership hacked the election has run up against the apparent fact that no votes have been found to have been changed. The charge that AstroTurf protests organized by the Russians led to dissent smells a lot like the last half-century of FBI / CIA lies against / about the Left. And the charge that narcissistic plutocrat Trump has been ‘compromised’ misses that he was already compromised by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. This is the problem.

The Democrats, in their wisdom, have given a gift to the U.S. intelligence ‘community’ that provides political cover for closing down inconvenient commentary and disrupting inconvenient political organizations. A political Left with a brain would be busy thinking through strategy for when the internet becomes completely unusable for organizing and communication. The unifying factor in the initial ‘fake news’ purge was criticism of Hillary Clinton. Print media, a once viable alternative, has been all but destroyed by the move to the internet. This capability needs to be rebuilt.

Bourgeois incredulity that Donald Trump still has supporters could be seen by an inquisitive Left through a lens of class struggle. Yes, his effective supporters are rich, just as the national Democrats’ are— the term for this is plutocracy. But back in the realm of human beings, rising deaths of despair tie in theory and fact to the wholesale abandonment of the American people by the political class. An inquisitive Left would be talking to these people, not at them. The Russian meddling story is a sideshow with a political purpose. But class struggle remains the relevant story.

Pakistan’s Voiceless Pashtuns Find Voice

Nauman Sadiq

Is it not ironic that two very similar insurgencies have simultaneously been going on in Pakistan for the last several years: the Baloch insurgency in the Balochistan province and the insurgency of the Pashtun tribesmen in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering the US-occupied Afghanistan.

While the Pakistani neoliberal elites fully sympathize with the oppressed Baloch nationalists, when it comes to the Pashtun tribesmen, they are willing to give Pakistan’s security agencies a license to kill, why? It’s simply because the tribal Pashtun insurgents use the veneer of religion to justify their tribal instinct of retribution.

The name Islam, however, is such an anathema to the core neoliberal sensibilities that the elites don’t even bother to delve deeper into the causes of insurgency and summarily decide that since the Pashtun tribesmen are using the odious label of the Taliban, therefore they are not worthy of their sympathies, and as a result, the security establishment gets a carte blanche to indiscriminately bomb the towns and villages of the Pashtun tribesmen.

As well-informed readers must be aware that military operations have been going on in the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2009; but a military operation – unlike law enforcement or Rangers operation, as in Karachi – is a different kind of operation; it’s an all-out war.

The army surrounds the insurgency-wracked area from all sides and orders the villagers to vacate their homes. Then the army calls in air force and heavy artillery to carpet bomb the whole area; after which ground troops move in to look for dead and injured in the rubble of towns and villages.

Air force bombardment and heavy artillery shelling has been going on in the tribal areas of Pakistan for several years; Pashtun tribesmen have been taking fire; their homes, property and livelihoods have been destroyed; they have lost their families and children in this brutal war, which has displaced millions of tribesmen who have been rotting in the refugee camps in Peshawar, Mardan and Bannu districts since 2009, after the Swat and South Waziristan military operations.

I have knowingly used the word ‘Pashtun tribesmen’ instead of ‘Taliban’ here, because this phenomena of revenge has more to do with tribal culture than religion, per se. In the lawless tribal areas, the tribesmen don’t have courts and police to settle disputes and enforce justice; justice is dispensed by tribes themselves; the clans, families and relatives of slain victims seek revenge, which is the fundamental axiom of their tribal ‘jurisprudence.’

It’s worth noting here that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants, the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus. The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.

Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because such militant groups are regarded as ‘strategic assets’ by Pakistan’s security agencies.

Notwithstanding, the Pashtuns are the most unfortunate nation on the planet nowadays, because nobody understands and represents them; not even their own leadership, whether religious or ethnic. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns are represented by Washington’s stooges, like Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and in Pakistan, the Pashtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party (ANP), loves to play the victim card and finds solace in learned helplessness.

In Pakistan, however, the Pashtuns are no longer represented by a single political entity, a fact which became obvious after the 2013 parliamentary elections in which the Pashtun nationalist ANP was wiped out of its former strongholds.

Now, there are at least three distinct categories of Pashtuns: firstly, the Pashtun nationalists who follow Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s legacy and have their strongholds in Charsadda and Mardan districts; secondly, the religiously inclined Islamist Pashtuns who vote for Islamist political parties, such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in the southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and thirdly, the emerging new phenomena, the Pakistan nationalist Pashtuns, most of whom have joined Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in recent years, though some have also joined Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League.

It would be pertinent to mention here that the general elections of 2013 were contested on a single issue: Pakistan’s partnership in the American-led war on terror, which has displaced millions of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party was routed, because in keeping with its supposedly “liberal interventionist” ideology, it stood for military operations against Islamist Pashtun militants in tribal areas; and the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province gave a sweeping mandate to the newcomer in the Pakistani political landscape: Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, because the latter promised to deal with tribal militants through negotiations and political settlements.

Although both Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif failed to keep their election pledge of using peaceful means for dealing with the menace of religious extremism and militancy, the public sentiment has been firmly against military operations in tribal areas. The 2013 parliamentary elections were, in a way, a referendum against Pakistan’s partnership in the American-led war on terror in the Af-Pak region, and the Pashtun electorate gave a sweeping mandate to pro-peace political parties against the pro-war Pakistan People’s Party and Awami National Party.