South Africa Searches for a Financial Parachute, Now That a $170 Billion Foreign Debt Cliff Looms

Patrick Bond


This week’s hush-hush visit by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde to Pretoria (between stops in Accra and Luanda) will raise eyebrows. In contrast to last week’s IMF press briefing claim – “Madame Lagarde will hold meetings with the authorities, as well as fairly extensive meetings with the private sector, civil society, academia, women leaders, and of course the media” – there’s a complete information void, and no public events scheduled.

An open, frank public discussion about the IMF’s regrettable history and current agenda is sorely needed, in a context here in South Africa where a few honest politicians and officials are belatedly struggling to reverse what is termed “state capture,” and return stolen funds to the taxpayer. Undoing a decade of looting by former President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta empire (three immigrant brothers plus hundreds of hangers-on) he protected is no small task.

Hence it is perhaps with discomfort that Lagarde will meet one of the key post-Zuma/Gupta leaders, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, who twice (in 2013 and 2016) tweeted about Lagarde’s own corruption trial in France. She was found guilty of ‘negligence’ for gifting $430 million to a tycoon – Adidas founder and French state-capturer Bernard Tapie – who donated to her Conservative Party when she was finance minister, and who in 2017 was forced to repay the French state.

Retribution for corruption is indeed in the Pretoria air, for two months ago, Mboweni replaced Nhlanhla Nene, who resigned in disgrace over lying about his secret Gupta meetings. But is Mboweni himself arranging a secret IMF bailout deal, as happened 25 years ago when the IMF granted an infamous $850 million loan – a “Faustian Pact” (according to former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils) replete with Washington Consensus promises – to outgoing president FW de Klerk, so as to “instil global financial confidence” in the coming Mandela government?

After five “junk!” denunciations by the three most powerful (albeit suspect) credit ratings agencies over the past 18 months, President Cyril Ramaphosa has tried hard to restore their trust. However, with Eskom now trying to dump another R100 billion in debt onto the Treasury, he now appears to need a financial back-stop from the Bretton Woods Institutions.

Indeed, more to the point, is electricity parastatal agency Eskom’s foreign debt again creating havoc, as happened eleven months ago with a “pending letter of default from the World Bank” that “could trigger a recall on Eskom’s $25 billion debt mountain,” as Carol Paton reported in Business Day (prior to Ramaphosa’s urgent, apparently soothing meeting with Bank officials in Davos)?

Lagarde’s opaque visit this week contrasts with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s high-profile trip earlier this month, amidst a blaze of Global Citizen anti-poverty populism to 90,000 youth at FNB Stadium: “I’m telling you, you can’t trust anyone over 30 to determine your future!” Kim met Ramaphosa to discuss, he tweeted, urban planning and sanitation (neither of which would need US$-denominated Bank loans to finance imports). He also lectured at the Wits School of Governance on human capital investment (jovially criticising another ex-lefty, his host former Vice Chancellor Adam Habib, for being a “student of Trotsky”).

Ramaphosa: “We’re not looking at the IMF. The New Development Bank has a facility”

Are new loans from the IMF and World Bank really needed? On the one hand, their leaders are here in the wake of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA Sandton summit in July, which again raised hopes for the BRICS bloc’s international financial governance reform agenda.

For example, notwithstanding angry protests by environmental justice activists at its Sandton Africa Regional Centre office, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) quickly announced loans to three local parastatal agencies. One of these credits, Eskom’s $180 million, was “in abeyance” since 2016 due to then-CEO Brian Molefe’s second thoughts: he opposed the loan’s linkage of privatised renewable energy to Eskom’s grid (instead, Molefe wanted to take on more nuclear debt, which Mboweni – then an NDB director – had publicly endorsed in 2015, while in Russia).

The other credits went to transport parastatal agency Transnet’s Siyabonga Gama (who was fired for Gupta-related corruption a few weeks later) for $200 million to expand the Durban port-petrochemical complex– a project now frozen due to brazen procurement fraud involving a notorious Italian firm (unrelated to the Guptas) – and to the Development Bank of Southern Africa for on-lending $300 million to municipalities (assuming there are any creditworthy ones left, able to pay sufficiently high interest rates to justify a hard-currency loan for local infrastructure).

Explained Earthlife Africa protester Makoma Lekalakala, co-winner of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize as Africa’s leading activist, “Both Eskom and Transnet are under scrutiny for corruption and mismanagement. No due diligence was done on the Transnet loan. If this is how the [BRICS] bank operates, we have to brace ourselves for accelerated environmental degradation for the pursuit of profit.”

But the Bretton Woods Institutions are no better, and just over a year ago, Ramaphosa offered a scathing critique  of Washington’s bias: “We should not go to the IMF because once we do we are on a downward path, we will be sacrificing our independence in terms of governing our country and sacrificing our sovereignty.” He cited the risk of imposed “cuts in social spending” what with anticipated IMF orders to Eskom, “to do away with free electricity quotas for the poor and indigent” (an inadequate 50kWh/household/month, about three days’ use).

Ramaphosa repeatedly denies that the Bretton Woods Institutions will bail out South Africa: “IMF, no, we’re not looking at the IMF. The New Development Bank has a facility that could be made available to us. And we are exploring that as well. And we want to do it in a way that does not require a sovereign guarantee.” Actually, Ramaphosa probably didn’t mean the BRICS NDB, which makes project-specific loans, but instead its $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which has a $3 billion credit line for South Africa to immediately draw upon in the event of a balance-of-payments emergency deficit.

BRICS v IMF – or BRICS-IMF?

On the other hand, the BRICS look much less coherent today than in July, because Brazil’s new leader Jair Bolsonaro could drop out of the bloc, and at minimum, will more firmly hitch his Brasilia to Washington. Still, in spite of his oft-expressed Sinophobia, Bolsonaro has just grudgingly agreed to continue the rotation of BRICS heads-of-state summit hosting (although this is likely only to occur in Brasilia next November). There will be much Trump-style geopolitical, economic and especially environmental chaos starting on January 1 when he becomes president, such as paving over the Amazon. But compared to November, fewer insiders whom I talked to (including former Foreign Finister Celso Amorim) – while visiting earlier this month – fear that Bolsonaro will reduce the bloc to RICS through a ‘Braxit,’ the way he just did to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit. (His predecessor Michel Temer had agreed to host the it in Brazil late next year, but Chile will now take over.)

The old, oft-stated contrast between the agendas of BRICS and Washington, as articulated by Jacob Zuma’s scribe Gayton Mckenzie, for instance, was in any case mainly myth. From 2014, Lagarde has enjoyed the power to co-finance the more desperate of BRICS borrowers (e.g. Brazil and Russia are also junk-status), because the CRA’s Articles of Agreement stipulate that if Pretoria wants the next $7 billion in BRICS funding within its $10 billion quota range, it must first get an IMF structural adjustment programme.

If Pretoria needs financing to repay increasingly onerous foreign debt tranches in 2019, could this fractured society withstand even more austerity, given what Business Day already termed 2018’s “savage fiscal consolidation” that radically reduced basic-infrastructure grants, which in turn led even Johannesburg’s neoliberal mayor, Herman Mashaba, to cry foul on Treasury’s 65% budget cut to the city’s housing programme last week?

At the global scale, the BRICS financial institutions are not up to the massive bailout requirements necessary if financial meltdowns similar to 1998 and 2008 reappear in coming weeks, for instance due to Britain’s anticipated “hard crash” from the European Union on March 29. In even the recent weeks’ relatively mild economic turmoil, the South African currency was the world’s most volatile (out of the 31 most traded). The Rand continues to be roiled in part by Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba’s February 2018 relaxation of exchange controls on $43 billion worth of local institutional investor funding that can now depart South Africa. (That puts into context the oft-remarked $7 billion exit threat from Citibank’s World Government Bond Index once Moody’s finally drops the junk axe on the domestic-denominated securities rating.)

However, while the Treasury continues to pay close to a 9% hard-currency interest rate on 10-year state bonds (even higher than does Venezuela), there will be willing buyers – until the next world financial melt ratchets rates even higher. And in spite of BRICS babble about IMF reform so as to lessen the load of borrower conditionalities, there have been no changes in economic philosophy under Lagarde. Worse, Africa lost substantial voting power in the 2015 restructuring, including Nigeria by 41% and South Africa by 21%. The main countries that raised their respective IMF shares were China (35%), Brazil (23%), India (11%) and Russia (8%). BRIC solidarity with Africa went AWOL.

An alternative strategy: repudiation of corrupt bankers

IMF reform that leaves most Africans with less voice is better considered deform, Ramaphosa himself seemed to concede in a speech to the United Nations in September, complaining that the IMF and other multilateral institutions still “need to be reshaped and enhanced so that they may more effectively meet the challenges of the contemporary world and better serve the interests of the poor and marginalised.”

Because their interests are not served by either Washington’s or the NDB’s lending to corrupt parastatal elites, the “poor and marginalised” need another strategy. Just as in the days of the Jubilee 2000 debt-repudiation movement, led here two decades ago by the late poet Dennis Brutus and Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, it’s overdue we talk about, and indeed audit, South Africa’s foreign debt.

Including parastatal and private borrowers (for whom the state ensures hard currency is available for repayment), foreign debt stood at $171 billion as of mid-year (up from $25 billion in 1994). That figure, the SA Reserve Bank announced last week, is down nearly 8% from March 2018’s $183 billion, but only as a result of “non-residents’ net sales of domestic rand-denominated government bonds as well as valuation effects.” (More painfully in Rand terms, foreign debt increased from R2.165 trillion in March to R2.347 trillion at end-June.)

The main foreign debtors remain Eskom and Transnet. They have contracted, over the past eight years, South Africa’s three largest-ever loans:

+ in 2010, $3.75 billion from the World Bank, mainly for the Medupi coal-fired power plant (a deal for which Eskom chairperson Valli Moosa was criticised by the public protector for ‘improper’ conflict of interests since he sat on the ANC Finance Committee, during the notorious Hitachi corruption of the ruling party);

+ in 2013, $5 billion from the China Development Bank, mainly for Transnet’s purchase of imported infrastructure inputs, especially for corrupt port-petrochemical expansion in Durban and a coal export rail line to Richards Bay (billions of rands were illicitly directed via China South Rail to the Gupta empire); and

+ in 2016, $5 billion again from the China Development Bank,mainly for Eskom’s other coal-fired mega-generator, Kusile, initially arranged by Molefe and renewed at the BRICS Sandton summit last July.

None of these loans can be justified, especially on ecological grounds – since they all rapidly increase the climate debt we South Africans owe both future generations and, more urgently, contemporary African victims of worsening droughts and floods. Moreover, with state procurement corruption costing in the range of 35-40% per contract, according to the lead Treasury official in 2016, there is a strong case for a full debt audit, followed by the demand that the World Bank, China Development Bank, BRICS Bank and other lenders also assume liability.

After all, the Hitachi deal with the ANC’s investment wing Chancellor House led the U.S. government to fine the Japanese firm nearly R300 million in 2015 – for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations at Eskom – and hence when Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan (responsible for borrowing the $3.75 billion in 2010) last week blamed Hitachi incompetence for recent load-shedding, that alone should invoke World Bank debt repudiation.

Jim Kim should not only have addressed this largest – and perhaps worst – loan in his institution’s history. The Bank’s portfolio also includes the largest share in the notorious CPS-Net1 “financial inclusion” strategy to rip off millions of poor South Africans, and a $150 million debt+equity stake in Lonmin which until just before the 2012 Marikana massacre (a few weeks after Kim became president) the Bank was celebrating as a best-case for corporate social responsibility.

Add to all this the new threat of Faustian Pact 2.0 from the ethically-challenged Lagarde, and the need for a revived Jubilee movement is obvious. All existing anti-corruption initiatives should be pursued forthwith, but our ever lower expectations mean that a genuine Ramaphoria – which if serious would include repudiation of the Gupta and ANC fraudsters’ financial facilitators, such as the World Bank, China Development Bank and BRICS Bank – is simply a fantasy. Instead, the meme best describing our current state of governance is, indeed, Ramazupta.

World of Virtual Sexual Harassment

Kabir Deb

Being from the male gender gathering information and taking a surveillance from the social networks on the obscene attacks over the female gender is easy but at the same time it is quite sadist for the mind and body. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc., though have been made to initiate connection but at the same time it has facilitated the spread of obscenity to a much easier extent. The social network is the most naked revelation of how cursed and evil our society is even in the presence of faith, reformers, monetary expansion. Whenever I surf through the social network, it’s not tough to find the presence of horrifying sexual attacks over women in abundance.

Today it’s easier to harass a woman over social network just because it has got full safety. A person can make several accounts to harass a woman and no one will come to know who that person really is because the first thing a woman does to stop the harassment is by ignoring the messages or comments and secondly the woman tries to block the person or to report the account. But it never safeguards a woman from the evil attempt of men over women because it is the true picture of society. Just like the real society, the virtual society too has everything to harass a woman but little to stop or curb the harassment. Even the cyber bureau too, reports 1 out of 10 accounts from Facebook and Twitter. Social embarrassment is one of the ways to reveal the true identity of a molester but it never stops molestation.

After a survey, I found the following kinds of harassment happening abundantly over social network:

● CROTCH PICTURE: Women of social network has got more number of obscene texts and pictures than any other texts.Today when a woman opens an account a woman doesn’t have to stay for a long time to find a dick picture in her inbox because it is the extent of obscenity happening in the platform. She receives an array of messages just to create a foundation for the rise of sexual harassment which is the end note of every man. A man can reach to a severe extent to attempt any kind of harassment just on the basis of his imagination which he inputs in the messages. And here men cannot say, “not all men” because as a man I am quite aware of how obscene our mind is and how attacking our testosterone can be.

● INPUT OF PORN OVER MESSAGES: The ban of the GOI over porn has been one of the most ridiculous thing because where a man lives, porn cannot entice harassment because it is already present in our mind from history itself. In social network, men just creates a new virtual world of women over the ways porn is made. Women today on social networks are treated a toy just because the mind of a man indulges porn to harass a woman. But, on a brief note, porn cannot lead a man to harassment because porn is for both the gender but it never encourages to drag a conversation towards the ways porn is made. For a man, it doesn’t take a long time to induce porn in the form of BDSM, Anal or any other kind because the conversation of a man always runs in that direction. Porn wasn’t made to find a society to find new ways to ruin it, the mind of a man has got the intention to incite brutality on women for their crotch finds relief in the process.

● FACE SWAP: Social network has got the process to scandalise a woman by face swapping a woman with a porn star. If you don’t believe me, then just take one hour to find the number of accounts having the face swap trend. For a man, it’s pleasing to see women of his choice having intercourse with him or any other him. Social networking has taken love to run extinct because even one who loves a woman but never gets her, he finds the face swap method as a way to create pleasure for him. Mark my word, being a man it is embarrassing but it is realistic that we are brutal and we are molesters in mask.

● PHOTO STEALING: The obscene culture of stealing of photos of women to create accounts was started to initiate sexual harassment over those women. It makes easy for a man to masturbate by seeing other men attacking a woman of his choice. More than million accounts of women exist which are being operated by men just because they send messages to men with sexual harassment in it while men harass the woman which gives him the pleasure. According to social survey, one out of five accounts exist which are having another account with the same picture. Thus, it is quite disturbing to see that how men create obscenity in every platform just because the testosterone finds pleasure in it.

● INTERFAITH SEXUAL PLEASURE: Today social networks have got more than one lakh accounts which are being operated with women and men from a particular religion in profile picture just because a man from one particular religion finds interfaith sexual intercourse as a masturbating material. Interfaith sexual intercourse has been termed from social sites and it is defined as men from different religion finds it pleasing to attack or harass women of a different religion. Yes, that’s the reality fellas, it’s the obscene reality of the social network. Even the men don’t leave pictures of Allah and devotees to create it as a tattoo on a woman having intercourse to attack both the gender and religion creating a disturbing picture. In my survey, I have found numerous such accounts which I could have provided here, but it may create tension. Sadly, the cyber crime is aware of this but does nothing because after all they enjoy it too.

● RISE OF INCEST SEXUAL REMARKS: Son’s dick penetrating mother’s clit! Brother obsessed with sister’s body! Father watches daughter naked! How do you feel after watching these voyeuristic obscenity? Weird, shocking, embarrassed? You don’t have to be because it’s happening right in front of you in words in the form of stories written as incest sex stories, account sharing in Facebook, sexual harassment by uttering Mother fucker, Sister fucker and irritating a woman with these relationship destroying remarks. In the century where we are protesting against marital rapes, incest rapes and rapes in overall, simultaneously, a group exists in social media which is obsessed with making this as a trend to create pleasure just for the male gender since it is completely female oriented and produced both by the male and female gender. Incest, today has become a symbol or a world to provide pleasure to the crotch to maintain the testosterone.

● GENDER HARASSING COMMENTS: Today one out of five comments exist beneath every picture just to sexually harass a woman based based on her body parts, clothes, style on the basis of words like hot, Maal, sexy, Pataka, etc., for the woman who wears short clothe as if she is a commodity. Harassing happens even when the topic is political or religious because when a man starts to lose in an argument with a woman, he proceeds to harass her on the basis of his obscene remarks on her body parts and that’s the social molestation world. Ever heard the term “son of a prostitute”, “cunt fucker”! Obviously you all have. Just see, how patriarchal the reality is when it comes to bashing the female gender only with proper care and piercing the rod of obscenity.

● USING SEXIST REMARKS TO BE DOMINANT: Accept a particular reality, men fail to find logical conclusions when they find extremism as the only way to be dominant to a woman which often happens. No matter whether it happens with Faye D’Souza, Radhika Apte, Swara Bhaskar, Sheila Rashid or any other political activist of social network or in reality, men who fail to argue turn to find obscenity in her breasts, way of free speech, how easy her pen talks, to make her feel that it is the body that is the main target of masculinity and patriarchy. Dominance of men always finds existence when they can easily embarrass women by hook or crook.

Take a survey. Form a group to find every molester to create a virtual world having peace which can be attained. Virtual world needs our activism to the ultimate extent. Believe the reality and accept it to finally kill it.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War

Michael T. Klare

There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision.

That was then, of course, and this is now. And what a now it is! With artificial intelligence, or AI, soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to determine humanity’s fate.

This isn’t idle conjecture based on science fiction movies or dystopian novels. It’s all too real, all too here and now, or at least here and soon to be. As the Pentagon and the military commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a highly contested battlefield — some have called it a “hyperwar” environment — where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought, commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where. At first, this may not extend to nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the “firebreak” between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making.

Such an outcome can only grow more likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intended to transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy. Rather than focusing mainly on weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional (air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human oversight.

“The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war,” observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Hussain. “In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing, and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands of individual decisions with no additional input.”

That “minimization of human decision-making” will have profound implications for the future of combat. Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations of uncontrolled escalation.

It may be years, possibly decades, before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview, “For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100.”

Why AI?

Even five years ago, there were few in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or robotics when it came to major combat operations. Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or drones, have been widely used in Africa and the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S. commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In addition, today’s RPAs are still controlled by human operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however, such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans in many or even most combat functions.

To speed this transformation, the Department of Defense is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI-related research. “We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s thinking, weapons, or equipment,” Mattis told Congress in April. To ensure continued military supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more “investment in technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics.”

Why the sudden emphasis on AI and robotics? It begins, of course, with the astonishing progress made by the tech community — much of it based in Silicon Valley, California — in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice Services, is the computer system behind Amazon’s smart speaker that not only can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (“Alexa, play classical music.” “Alexa, tell me today’s weather.” “Alexa, turn the lights on.”) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize transportation.

Artificial Intelligence is an “omni-use” technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan information agency, “as it has the potential to be integrated into virtually everything.” It’s also a “dual-use” technology in that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future battlefields. Similarly, someday drone aircraft — without human operators in distant locales — will be capable of scouring a battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants), determining that something it “sees” is indeed on its target list, and “deciding” to launch a missile at it.

It doesn’t take a particularly nimble brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology: they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused in densely packed battlespaces. In such an environment, speed in decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more battlefield variables.

As General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2017,

“It is very compelling when one looks at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence.”

Aside from aiming to exploit AI in the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome America’s advantages in conventional weaponry. According to the Congressional Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this country’s military superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly then, in the fashion of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold War nuclear weaponry), an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects. In true arms race fashion, this dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare.

Command and Control

As this arms race unfolds, artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines and surface ships. At the outset of combat, all these instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines may well be lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further human intervention.

Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully autonomous weapons — sometimes called “killer robots” — with a capacity to make life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from harm to the greatest extent possible. Advocates of the new technology claim that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems.

In the meantime, a perhaps even more consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of AI to command-and-control (C2) systems — that is, to ways senior officers will communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era, such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However, strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the data, and dispatch timely orders. Consider this a functional definition of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence — with defeat a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional Research Service puts it, in the future “AI algorithms may provide commanders with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space, which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events.”

And someday, of course, it’s possible to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best options without human instructions.

Pentagon officials deny that any of this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however, that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit, lest it lose the strategic high ground. “We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision,” then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security in a 2016 interview. But he added the usual caveat: in the future, “we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.”

The Doomsday Decision

The assumption in most of these scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional conflicts could cross a threshold that’s never been crossed before: an actual nuclear war between two nuclear states. And should that happen, those AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position to launch atomic weapons.

Such a danger arises from the convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemy’s mobile retaliatory weapons and so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to any nuclear attack. Given such a “use ’em or lose ’em” scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines. And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further escalation.

The question then arises: Would machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation? They certainly are capable of processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner. But machines also make military mistakes and, above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation.

As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None, a new book on AI and warfare, “Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions, no ability to step back from the brink of war.”

So maybe we should think twice about giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a machine-made Armageddon.

End of India’s long, dark night?

Aijaz Zaka Syed

The spring of hope has arrived at last. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its powerful propaganda machine had pitched this as a contest between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi — Namdar versus Kamdar (the entitled one vs someone who has worked his way up). And the voters have spoken what they think of the performance of Kamdar! The Indians have rejected the politics of hate.

The BJP went to absurd lengths to win the just-concluded elections in five states. Prime Minister Modi himself led from the front launching unbelievably personal attacks on the Congress leadership, not sparing even a convalescing Sonia Gandhi and the long-deceased icons of the Gandhi-Nehru family.

The Hindutva brigade tried every trick in its book to polarize and split the electorate along sectarian lines with Yogi Adityanath and others addressing hundreds of public meetings spreading sweetness and light and promising the kind of anarchy Uttar Pradesh boasts today.

Yet if the Congress has managed to win and carry these big Hindi heartland states — Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – the credit goes to Rahul Gandhi and young leaders like Sachin Pilot.

The success arriving as it did on the day Rahul completed one year at the helm of the grand old party couldn’t have been sweeter considering the open hostility and witch hunt that he has faced at the hands of the saffron clan and much of the ‘Modi-fied’ media.

From being endlessly ridiculed as Pappu (idiot) to being questioned on his very ‘Indianness’ and leadership and communication skills, Rahul has been the target of an incredibly vicious campaign for the past five years and more. And it has been personally led by none other than Modi himself deliberately distorting every word uttered by the opposition leader.

This is why Rahul has every reason to pat himself on the back for not just standing up to the BJP and weathering its vicious attacks but coming off with flying colors.

The Congress leader has remained humble and gracious in his victory, never once crowing after capturing the three strategic BJP fortresses.

It had been a totally one-sided contest from the word go. A typical David versus Goliath kind of battle, if ever there was one. Not a mean feat considering the massive resources and big moneybags at the BJP’s disposal and the unabashed support it has been receiving from the media.

Yet given the overwhelming popular anger and rural distress in these battleground states over the continuing devastating effects of demonetization, GST and the anti-incumbency factor, it is surprising that the Congress did not register a far emphatic victory. The BJP managed to put up a strong show both in MP and Rajasthan, losing many seats by a couple of hundred votes or even less.

Which means although the saffron brigade may have lost these assembly polls thanks to its disastrous management of the economy and neglecting farmers, its core constituency largely remains intact.

The toxic influence of the RSS now pervades all arms and sinews of the body politic. From the government and administration to bureaucracy and from universities and think tanks to the media, no area remains free of its sway. Secular parties will, therefore, have to work harder to fight this permissive influence for the sake of their own future and survival, if not for anything else.

And now that the BJP has suffered these losses in these critical states, seen as the core of the party’s ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ worldview, it is certain that its battle-hardened election-winning machine led by Modi and Amit Shah will pull out all stops for the greater battle ahead in 2019.

Is the opposition up to the task? While this much-needed victory has understandably lifted the mood in the long-demoralized and dispirited Congress and other opposition parties, the battle ahead is hardly going to be an easy one.

With its back to the wall, the BJP is sure to fight even harder and will do everything to retain power. Justice Markandey Katju’s apprehensions that a desperate Parivar could start a major communal conflagration or even a war with Pakistan to rally popular support aren’t without basis.

The only way for the secular opposition parties to fight the BJP and its powerful Parivar is to rally all their forces and put up a united fight. Nothing else is going to work.

Notwithstanding the vital lessons of Karnataka, where a last-minute Congress-Janata Dal (S) coalition was able to keep out the BJP, the grand old party spurned fellow travelers such as the BSP and SP and chose to go it alone in both MP and Rajasthan.

If only the Congress had tied up with secular parties, the electoral tally in these states that would elect 65 MPs in 2019 would have been decidedly better.

Of course, Telangana has been an exception. The Congress’ partnership with Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam, once bitter rivals, did not take off because of the far more irresistible alternative that was offered by Chandrashekhar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti.

In addition to its formidable alliance with Asaduddin Owaisi’s Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, what really worked for the TRS was its unprecedented welfare measures targeting virtually every section of the electorate. The Muslim community, for instance, has benefited much from the 121 minority residential schools established by the Telangana government. This is why Rahul’s rallies with Naidu in what had once been a Congress bastion failed to sway the voters.

Yet an accommodative approach by the Congress and other secular stakeholders is what is badly needed in months and years ahead.

What will it take for the grand old party to come off its high horse? The Congress holds the key to opposition’s challenge to Modi. After all, it is the only national party with presence in all parts of the country. It remains the only force that can stop the saffron juggernaut. The Congress holds the lynchpin to opposition’s grand alliance against the ideology of hate.

Yet at a time when it is fighting for its very survival across the country, the Congress inexplicably continues to harbor these delusions of grandeur and has repeatedly failed to reach out to other secular parties.

The BJP has always been quick to cobble up alliances. Indeed, the BJP of Vajpayee and Advani grew from a 2-member outfit to its overarching presence today, riding on the shoulders of its allies like the Janata Dal of yore. It acquired a pan-India acceptability cleverly using its secular allies.

When will the Congress wake up to the new political realities of a new India? The answer holds the key to 2019 and the nation’s future. Only a more flexible and nimble-footed Congress that is willing to walk the proverbial extra mile to put together a rainbow coalition can prevent the BJP from returning to power.

What lies ahead is not just a battle between the BJP and Congress or between Modi and Rahul Gandhi. At stake is the very idea of a democratic and inclusive India.

Bangladesh to relocate Rohingya refugees on remote island

Rohantha De Silva 

The Bangladesh government is planning to move hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Burma (Myanmar) into prison-like dwellings on the remote and geographically unstable silt island of Bhasan Char.

Around 900,000 Rohingya refugees are currently living in bamboo shelters and other makeshift accommodation in flood-prone valleys in Bangladesh, having fled murderous attacks by the Burmese military and Buddhist supremacist forces since August last year.

The refugees are from Burma’s north-western Rakhine state where they constitute an oppressed Muslim minority. Stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982, they have been subjected to systematic, state-sanctioned oppression and violence, including murder, rape, the destruction of whole villages and mass expulsions. A recent UN report estimates that almost 400 villages have been destroyed, and about three quarters of a million Rohingya have been forced to flee Burma.

The Burmese government brands the Rohingya, who have lived in Burma for decades, or even centuries, as “Bengalis” or “illegal immigrants” and has called for their expulsion to neighbouring Bangladesh. About 200,000 Rohingya refugees were already living in Bangladesh before the latest exodus.

The Rohingya have sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh in the hope that they would be sympathetically treated in the Muslim majority country. These hopes, however, have been cruelly dashed by successive governments in Dhaka.

Despite widespread public sympathy for the refugees, the Awami League government initially used the military to block the entry of the latest wave of refugees. When this failed the government forced the refugees into squalid, over-crowded settlements and camps that lack clean water, proper sanitary and health facilities and inadequate supplies of food.

The government now wants to shift them to Bhasan Char. The prison-like conditions, which the government is attempting to hide, were revealed in video footage published late last month by the British-based Guardian newspaper.

According to the newspaper, the Bangladesh government plans to send some 700,000 refugees to the island, which is situated at the mouth of the Meghna River, and only accessible by boat.

The refugees will be housed in tiny breeze-block concrete rooms 2m x 2.5m, with small, steel-barred windows. There will only be one bathroom per 25 housing units. The government wanted to begin moving the refugees in October but construction delays forced a postponement until early next year.

Nervous about domestic and international criticism, the government is attempting to hide information about the facilities and has placed the island under the tight control of the navy. Apart from registered construction workers, selected UN members and government officials, all access to the island and the building site is strictly prohibited. No official details or photos of the facilities have been released.

An anonymous human rights activist who shot the video told the Guardian that the yet-to-be-completed facility was “eerie” and said that the “hundreds of thousands of prison-like units [would create] an entire city of Rohingya… This feels more like a prison camp than a refugee haven.”

Bhasan Char, which is prone to severe monsoonal flooding and typhoons, is a three-hour boat ride from the mainland and under military control. The shape-shifting island emerged from the muddy waters of the Bay of Bengal less than two decades ago.

While the government has tried to justify its moves by claiming that the relocation is a temporary arrangement, the concrete structures at Bhasan Char make clear that the facilities are to be permanent. Refugees will only be able to leave the island if they agree to return to Burma or are accepted by a third country.

With national elections scheduled for late December, the Bangladesh opposition parties are attempting to exploit widespread popular concern about the treatment of the Rohingya refugees for their own political gain. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is waiting until the elections are over before releasing any details of its plan which will inevitably involve forcible relocations.

The US-based Human Rights Watch has warned that the government’s plans “essentially turn the island into a detention centre.” The agency’s Asia deputy director, Phil Robertson, told the Guardian: “Bangladesh’s plan to transform a desolate isle into a packed settlement of Rohingya housed in stark concrete residential blocks raises concerns for both freedom of movement and long-term sustainability.”

Spelling out some of the future dangers that the refugees will face, he added: “The housing blocks on display look sturdy, but how will they fare if a typhoon hits and floods the island? Will Dhaka ensure that anyone who agrees to move to the island will be allowed to leave and return freely?”

Last month the Bangladesh government attempted to forcibly repatriate 2,200 refugees to Burma but was forced to abandon these plans in the face of widespread protests. Mohamad Saddiq Hossain, a community leader from the Kutupalong refugee camp, told the Dhaka-based Telegraph on November 18: “We will not return without being given our rights as citizens.. . We would rather die here than be taken back there.”

While Rohingya continue to flee Burma, the refugees, rather than endure the miserable treatment meted out in Bangladesh, are prepared to risk their lives by attempting to sail to Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries. Over 200 lives have been lost in the Bay of Bengal since August last year.

The Guardian reported on December 5 that six boats carrying refugees from Burma had been washed ashore or stopped by authorities since October. Refugee boat sailings generally stop during June and August because of dangerous monsoon conditions. The fact that these sailings have resumed is another indication that the persecution of Rohingya by the Burmese government and its military and police continues unabated.

Canada’s media foments anti-China campaign after Meng arrest

Roger Jordan

Since Canada, acting at Washington’s behest, arrested senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Canada’s major media outlets have gone into high gear to justify her seizure as “lawful” and to depict China as a menace to Canada and the world.

The criminal charges the US has brought against Meng are transparently trumped up and politically motivated. Yet this has not stopped the media from greeting China’s complaints over Meng’s arrest with hoots, and from portraying Canada as under attack from an overbearing and bellicose China.

The Globe and Mail gloated, in a December 14 editorial titled "The end of the Trudeau government's China delusion," that Meng's Dec. 1 detention and the subsequent tit-for-tat arrest of two Canadian citizens in China have put paid to the Liberal government's plans for a free trade deal with Beijing. "The case of Meng Wanzhou has torpedoed the Trudeau government’s China policy," enthused the Globe, the traditional mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite. "At the same time, it has also sunk China’s Canada policy. Call it a win-win."

The neoconservative National Post was equally jubilant. Writing in the wake of the arrest by Chinese authorities of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, the Post declared their arrests could "prove useful," because "they ought to make it impossible for our prime minister, or any future prime ministers, to keep turning a blind eye to the criminal and thuggish nature of Beijing’s rulers."

This turns reality on its head. The Beijing regime is no doubt authoritarian, representing as it does the capitalist oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the People’s Republic. But it is not the aggressor in this case.

On the contrary, Canada, in collusion with its closest geostrategic and economic ally, mounted a political provocation, effectively kidnapping Meng on the very same day that US President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit with the ostensible aim of reaching a deal to settle their US-instigated tariff war.

The US is seeking to extradite Meng to face two charges of fraud, each of which carries a potential penalty of 30 years in prison. The charges arise from Washington’s unilateral extraterritorial sanctions on Iran—sanctions that in their global reach are both illegal and tantamount to an act of war. As observers have noted, Meng has clearly been singled out for exemplary treatment. Till now the US had not tried to hold executives of major corporations personally liable when seeking retribution for alleged cases of “sanctions busting,” choosing rather to levy financial penalties on the corporations involved.

The day after Meng's arrest was made public, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged that he was warned in advance about the planned action. Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, also revealed that he knew about the plan to detain Meng, underscoring that her impending arrest was discussed at the highest levels of both the US and Canadian states.

Acting on the orders of Canada’s Justice Minister and Attorney-General Jody Wilson-Raybould, Crown prosecutors sought to deny bail to Meng, who in addition to being Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer is the daughter of the company’s founder and current CEO, Ren Zhengfei. Instead, a judge imposed onerous and humiliating bail conditions on Meng. These include that she must wear an electronic ankle tag at all times and pay for a round-the-clock security detail tasked with watching her every move, until her extradition hearing is concluded, a process that is expected to take many months.

US President Donald Trump has himself underlined the political character of the charges against Meng, exploding Trudeau’s pretense that her arrest was simply a legal-administrative matter. Last week Trump said he might intervene in Meng’s case if it would help the progress of trade talks with China. In other words, Meng is to be used as a bargaining chip in US imperialism's drive to subordinate China to its global predatory economic and geostrategic interests.

Reports have since emerged confirming that the arrest of Meng is part of a carefully prepared campaign, mounted by the United States and its allies in the Five Eyes global spy network, to prevent Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications and computer companies, from expanding their influence in global markets.

The Sydney Morning Herald has revealed that a meeting of Five Eyes intelligence chiefs in Halifax, Nova Scotia last July discussed measures to combat the influence of Huawei and Chinese technology more broadly in the development of global 5G networks. The US, Australia, and New Zealand have already banned Huawei from their respective 5G markets, and Washington is pressuring Britain and Canada to follow suit.

According to a report in Monday’s Globe and Mail, the Halifax meeting, which Trudeau attended in part, was the second time this year “spy chiefs from the Five Eyes intelligence network briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau … about the national-security risk from Chinese high-tech giant Huawei.”

For both commercial and military-security reasons, US imperialism is determined to prevent China from becoming a major player in global technology markets, especially in the area of wireless 5G communications. As Michael Morell, who twice served as the acting director of the CIA put it in a Dec. 14 Washington Post column, the US is engaged in a "tech war" with Beijing.

Morell—no doubt outlining the ambitions of the Pentagon and National Security Agency should the US dominate the world’s 5G networks—warned that China could use Huawei-developed 5G technology as "espionage platforms;" and, since 5G will be "particularly suitable for connecting things…and other mission-critical functions,” to conduct “sabotage, as well." The article concluded in a belligerent militarist tone, "There may not be an end to this technological cold war anytime soon, but it is vital for our national security that we not cede the field…and win the battle for 5G."

This is part of a much broader US-led strategy of confrontation towards China, arising in response to the loss of American imperialism’s global economic dominance. Beginning with the Obama administration's "Pivot" to Asia, Washington has vastly expanded the military resources it has deployed in the Asia-Pacific to prepare for an armed clash with China.

American warships and planes have repeatedly launched provocations over disputed territories in the South China Sea. These tensions have only escalated under Trump, whose tariffs against steel, aluminum, and other imports are principally aimed at forcing Beijing to permit greater foreign ownership in key economic sectors and to abandon its plans to make China a high-tech leader, under its so-called “made in China 2025” strategy.

The Globe and National Post editorials welcoming the Meng affair as an opportunity to shift the Trudeau government and public opinion behind a more aggressive stance against China underscore the broad support within the Canadian ruling circles for the US offensive against China.

During the past year, both the media and security-intelligence establishment have stepped up pressure on the government and other institutions to take a hardline stance towards China.

This included media support or at least acquiescence to Trump’s imposition on Canada of a clause in the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that gives Washington an effective veto over any future free trade deal between Ottawa and Beijing.

In his maiden public speech as head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), David Vigneault warned of national security threats to Canada from foreign technology. While he did not mention China by name, this was clearly understood to be his target.

Last week, the Globe revealed that senior CSIS officials met with representatives of the country's top research universities to urge them to beware of Huawei and curb Huawei-funded academic research.

Important sections of Canadian big business are concerned about the potential damage to Canada-China trade caused by the deterioration of bilateral relations.

But the Canadian ruling class views maintenance of its economic and military-security alliance with the US and of North American global hegemony as vital to upholding and advancing its own imperialist interests.

That is why not only has the Trudeau government done Washington’s bidding in the Meng case and key corporate media voices pressed Ottawa to join the US in taking a more belligerent stance against Beijing.

It is also why successive Conservative and Liberal governments have taken steps, behind the backs of the Canadian people, to integrate Canada ever more fully into the US military-strategic offensive against China. These include:

▪ The Harper Conservative government’s conclusion of a secret agreement with the US in 2013 for enhanced cooperation between the US and Canadian militaries in the Asia-Pacific.

▪ The Canadian Armed Forces’ negotiation of “forward-basing” agreements with Singapore and South Korea to facilitate military deployments in the event of a conflict in the Asia-Pacific.

▪ The Liberal government’s identification of China as a "global strategic threat" in its June 2017 National Defence Policy Review—the same review that announced a more than 70 percent increase in military spending over the next decade.

▪ The Canadian military’s deployment of ships and submarines to the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, and its assertion Canada must have a growing presence in these waters to assert its “strategic interests” and assure its role as a “global player.”