Trudeau triggers Canadian election in midst of pandemic’s fourth wave

Keith Jones

The Justin Trudeau-led minority Liberal government has triggered a federal election to be held—amid Canada’s Delta variant-driven fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic—on Monday, September 20.

The Liberal government’s election call is a gamble based on three cynical political calculations: First, that the Liberals, who have led Canada’s government for the past six years, are up in the polls and thus appear well-positioned to regain the parliamentary majority they lost in the October 2019 election; Second, that the Liberals’ electoral prospects could easily sour in coming months, whether because of economic headwinds, global geopolitical shocks, public demands for an accounting for Canada’s ruinous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, or popular anger over the ever-widening social chasm that divides Canada’s rich and super-rich from working people; And third, that the pandemic’s fourth wave will not overwhelm the health care system and cause thousands more deaths … at least prior to voting day.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trudeau and his handlers carefully scripted Sunday’s election call over many weeks. Nevertheless, they could not prevent an air of crisis from invading their election launch. Since the beginning of August, COVID-19 cases have spiked, as the inevitable result of governments across the country and at all levels abandoning virtually all anti-COVID-19 measures. In the two weeks ending Saturday, August 14, the average number of daily new infections more than doubled from 776 to 1,608, causing health experts, including the government’s own chief medical officer, Theresa Tam, to warn that the fourth wave is now upon us.

At his election launch, Trudeau was peppered with reporters’ questions as to why the government was triggering an election now. Would it not have been prudent to have first secured passage of Bill C-19, a government bill designed to facilitate mail-in voting and extend in-person voting over multiple days?

However, before Trudeau made any reference to the impending election, he was compelled to address events in Afghanistan, where in the preceding hours the Taliban had make a triumphant entry into Kabul. The ignominious collapse of Afghanistan’s made-in-USA puppet government, after two decades during which Washington squandered $2 trillion, the lives of thousands of US-NATO troops, and countless Afghans trying to subjugate the Central Asian nation is an historic debacle for US imperialism.

But it is also a debacle for Canada’s capitalist ruling elite, which for the past three quarters of a century has depended on its close military-security partnership with Washington to assert its own imperialist interests on the world stage. With the aim of strengthening this reactionary alliance, Canadian imperialism made the neocolonial Afghan war its own, deploying 40,000 troops to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014 and lavishing billions of dollars in aid on the Kabul regime.

Whilst the Canadian Armed Forces once boasted about the influence their embedded advisors exerted over the Afghan government, Trudeau was reduced on Sunday to announcing that Ottawa’s embassy in Kabul has been closed and all Canadian diplomatic personnel are being evacuated from the country.

Nonetheless, the prime minister went out of his way to reaffirm his government’s support for Canada’s role in the Afghan war. He declared Canada remains “committed to Afghanistan,” and vowed to work with NATO allies to ensure that the “sacrifice” of the more than 150 Canadian soldiers who died propping up the Karzai/Ghani government was not “in vain.” Above all, he sought to recycle the deeply discredited lies about Canada and its military promoting “humanitarian” and “democratic” values that provide political cover for Canadian imperialist aggression around the world.

In his prepared text on the election, Trudeau acknowledged the threat of an economic slump and invoked the climate change crisis, which has impacted millions of Canadians this summer in the form of drought, an unprecedented heat dome, and massive wildfires in much of western Canada. Along with the pandemic, he sought to tie these to his central electoral sales pitch: the claim that the Liberal government “has had Canadians’ backs.”

In reality, the Trudeau Liberal government has ruthlessly enforced the agenda of the ruling class. It ignored and played down the threat of the pandemic during the first 2 ½ months of 2020, so as not to impinge on profit interests. Only on March 10, 2020, did it even write the provinces to ask about potential shortages of personal protective equipment, ventilators and other essential supplies. Subsequently, it funneled some $650 billion into the markets and the coffers of big business to safeguard investors, then pivoted to pressing for “reopening” the economy, i.e., forcing workers back on the job in nonessential businesses amid the pandemic.

Similarly, behind phony progressive-sounding rhetoric, the Trudeau government has further integrated Canada into Washington’s military-strategic offensives against Russia and China and is spending tens of billions to procure new fleets of warplanes and warships.

If Trudeau is anxious to secure a parliamentary majority, it is to further insulate his government from any popular pressure, the better to press forward with implementing the reactionary agenda of the ruling class, from deregulation and privatization to austerity measures aimed at making working people pay for the corporate bailouts. The day before the election call, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and US Defense Secretary Lloyd James Austin III issued a joint statement on “modernizing” NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. It is meant to pave the way for further militarization of the Arctic, in the name of great-power “strategic competition” with Russia and China, and for Canada’s participation in the US ballistic missile shield, whose underlying purpose is to enable the US to wage a “winnable” nuclear war.

The opposition parties all made a show of deploring Trudeau’s “risky” decision to call an election amid an incipient fourth wave of the pandemic. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said he hoped “it won’t cost Canadians dearly.”

This is rich. All the federal opposition parties are themselves complicit in the Canadian ruling elite’s prioritizing of corporate profits over human lives throughout the pandemic. This has resulted in more than 26,700 officially recorded pandemic deaths, but probably closer to 40,000, according to a recent Royal Society of Canada study. The opposition parties’ provincial allies, from British Columbia’s John Horgan-led New Democratic Party (NDP) government to the hard-right Conservative governments in Ontario and Alberta, have all pursued the back-to-work/back-to-school policy that led to Canada’s devastating second and third pandemic waves. Moreover, now when ten million Canadians, including all children under 11 and under, have yet to get a single vaccine shot, they are all rushing to fully reopen schools for in-class instruction by early September.

Seeking to tap into justifiable popular concern that the election campaign will serve as a series of super-spreader events, O’Toole made a point of appearing only at virtual events on the campaign’s first day. But he also made a marked appeal to far-right, anti-vaccine, anti-mask forces in and around his Conservative Party. He said he would not require Conservative candidates to be vaccinated and made known his opposition to the government’s recent announcement that it will make it mandatory in the fall for all federal workers to be vaccinated.

In a transparent appeal for big-business support, O’Toole attacked the Trudeau government for having no plan to eliminate the deficit and promote economic growth. He also denounced Trudeau for being “offside on China for the past six years,” vowing that a Conservative government would immediately ban Huawei from Canada’s 5G network and otherwise align Ottawa even more fully behind Washington’s economic and military aggression against China.

At the express urging of its trade union affiliates, the purportedly “left” NDP has played the principal role in propping up the minority Liberal government over the past 22 months. Indeed, so anxious is the NDP for that collaboration to continue that party leader Jagmeet Singh wrote the unelected Governor General in late July to urge her to use her arbitrary powers to refuse Trudeau’s impending election request. But that did not stop Singh from decrying, at his party’s campaign launch, how the “ultra-rich” have benefited from Liberal policies and programs the NDP voted to enact.

With its promises of a wealth tax and pharmacare, the NDP is making a calibrated appeal to mounting social anger with the aim of securing more seats and influence. But its function first and foremost is to trap social opposition with the confines of establishment parliamentary politics.

Like the other party leaders, Singh deplored the collapse of the US-sponsored Afghan regime. A lengthy party policy statement published late last week, reiterated the NDP’s support for arming the Canadian Armed Forces with new, high-tech fighter jets and warships. “Decades of Liberal and Conservative cuts and mismanagement,” it complains, have left “our military…with outdated equipment, inadequate support and an unclear strategic mandate.”

The Bloc Québécois (BQ), currently the third largest party in parliament, launched its campaign Sunday on a strident chauvinist note. Party leader Yves-François Blanchet boasted that the BQ is the only party exclusively devoted to the “economic interests of Quebec,” that is supporting Quebec’s capitalist elite and Quebec-based businesses. The BQ postures as a “progressive” party. But it is a close ally of the province’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, which has adopted chauvinist legislation targeting immigrants and religious minorities, routinely threatens to criminalize worker job action, and denounces the “high wages” of manufacturing workers.

Annamie Paul, whose leadership of the Green Party has been challenged since one of the party’s three MPs defected to the Liberals in early June, stressed at her campaign launch that the “green economy” is where “the smart money” is going, and an “opportunity of a lifetime” for Canadian capitalism to become a “world leader.”

One faction of the trade union bureaucracy, led by Unifor, the country’s largest industrial union, and many of the teachers’ unions, is once again mounting an “Anybody but Conservative” campaign, urging in effect a vote for the Liberals in most constituencies. Another faction, including the top brass of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the United Steelworkers (USW), is somewhat more circumspect in its support for the Trudeau government. But both factions will urge the NDP to prop up a Trudeau Liberal government committed to boosting the global “competitive” and strategic position of Canadian capitalism in the event no party wins a majority on September 20.

Chinese regime reins in billionaire tech tycoons

Peter Symonds

Since November, the Chinese regime has taken several steps to restrict the operations of some of the country’s largest private tech companies, such as Alibaba and Tencent, hitting the fortunes of the multi-billionaire magnates that control them.

Jack Ma [Wikimedia/World Economic Forum/Claran McCrickard; Ma Juateng [Wikimedia]; Zhong Shanshan [Nongfu Spring]

Last week, China’s State Council and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee issued a joint policy statement calling for legislation to codify the measures. It declared there was an “urgent need” for additional laws to regulate the digital economy and internet finance to ensure “new business models develop in a healthy manner.”

The measures have provoked growing concern in the Western press because of plunges in share values of tech companies, in which global managed funds and other foreign companies have heavily invested.

Bloomberg calculated that the combined share values of the giant tech corporations at the beginning of July had fallen by a massive $US823 billion since their February peaks. According to the Financial Times, since the start of July, Beijing’s “regulatory assault on China’s technology industry” had lopped $87 billion off the net worth of the sector’s wealthiest tycoons.

Moves against the tech giants began when the Chinese regulators cancelled what was set to be the worlds’ largest-ever Initial Public Offering (IPO), for Alibaba’s financial services subsidiary Ant Group on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges in November. The IPO was about to raise $34 billion, eclipsing the $29.4 billion listing of the energy giant Saudi Aramco in 2019. At the same time, an anti-monopoly cause was launched against Alibaba that resulted in a $2.8 billion fine in April. Its founder Jack Ma, at the time China’s richest billionaire, who had made remarks critical of Chinese financial regulation, went to ground for weeks.

It has become clear this year that the government was not just engaged in a vendetta against Ma. The online food delivery company Meituan lost $40 billion of its market value after the state regulators opened an investigation into its “suspected monopolistic practices,” alleging that it was forcing restaurants to use its app exclusively, to the detriment of its rivals. Last month its shares plunged further after authorities instituted rules to provide limited protection to the notoriously exploited delivery workers.

The internet ride-hailing company Didi, China’s equivalent to Uber, proceeded with its IPO in New York in June despite a request by Chinese regulators to call it off. Days later, authorities ordered a security review of the firm amid concerns that the US listing could provide foreign access to its vast store of personal data. It was banned from taking new customers and mobile phone stores were ordered to remove its apps.

The regulatory targets have not been just tech companies. The Chinese government announced new regulations on July 23 for the online education industry, banning IPOs and forcing companies to operate as non-profit bodies. Shares in the three largest US-listed Chinese companies—TAL Education, New Oriental and Gaotu Techedu—fell precipitously.

In late July, Chinese anti-trust authorities ordered the giant internet corporation Tencent to give up its exclusive music licencing rights and fined it over its acquisition of China Music in 2016. The purchase gave Tencent exclusive control of more than 80 percent of music library resources, placing rivals at unfair advantage, according to regulators.

The response in the financial media has been increasingly frantic. An article this month in the New York Magazine declared: “The CCP’s brand of capitalism had never been Milton Friedman’s. But it had been decades since the party had displayed such communist characteristics.” An opinion piece by financial speculator George Soros in the Wall Street Journal last Friday denounced Chinese President Xi Jinping as a dictator whose regulatory campaign “threatens to destroy the geese that lay the golden eggs.”

Xi is not about to overturn Chinese capitalism, nor is the regime implementing “communist” measure. It is not out to destroy the super-wealthy oligarchs such as Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, whom it helped to create, and with whom it has had close relations. Rather the regulatory efforts to rein in the sprawling tech empires reflect fears in ruling circles in Beijing about the country’s extreme social tensions and mounting economic and financial crisis.

These concerns found expression late last year when Xi announced that 2021 would mark the beginning of a “new development phase” that would prioritise “common prosperity,” national security and social stability over unrestrained growth.

Fears in Beijing over social stability stem from the widening gulf between rich and poor that has resulted from decades of capitalist restoration. At one extreme are the billionaires and multi-billionaires who in some cases are members of the CCP or have been delegates to the annual National People’s Congress. At the other extreme are large sections of working people struggling to survive. Last year, Premier Li Keqiang told a press conference that some 600 million people exist on a monthly income of just 1,000 yuan ($154), which is not enough to rent a home in a mid-sized city, let alone cover other expenses.

Social distress, which has been compounded by the measures necessary to control the COVID-19 pandemic, is among the factors fuelling a political radicalisation, particularly among young people.

In a comment last month hailing to mark the centenary of the CCP’s founding, Chinese academic and venture capitalist Eric Li noted that, unlike his generation that focussed on getting rich, China’s youth today are increasingly critical of capitalism.

Li wrote: “Significant signs show that Chinese young people’s perception of capital and market have turned negative, and their support for socialism and communism have increased markedly. For example, on Bilibili, China’s leading video social media for young people, content with communism, Marxism, capital, and labor became most popular in 2020, with increases greater than any other content. Even in the extraordinarily entrepreneurial tech sector, calls by young people for stopping excessive exploitations, both of lowly paid delivery workers and more highly compensated but overworked technical and professional workforces, are becoming louder.”

Li, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the CCP, maintained that the party was capable of responding to these concerns. No doubt, the targeting of high-profile billionaires is calculated to appeal to widespread hostility to widening social inequality, as are the moves to limit the gross exploitation of casual delivery workers. The transformation of the giant private education corporations into non-profit organisations is likely to be popular among parents concerned to ensure the best for their children in the highly competitive education system.

The CCP regime, however, is not reining in the thousand or so Chinese billionaires spawned by capitalist restoration across the board. Manufacturers have increased in value. The richest man in China is Zhong Shanshan, who controls the bottled-water company Nongfu Spring and whose wealth stands at more than $782 billion, up by $5 billion since June. The country’s nine richest auto magnates have increased their collective wealth by $22 billion since July, while the eight billionaires who dominate the renewable energy sector saw their collective riches rise by $13.6 billion during the same period.

Through their internet payment systems and provision of credit, the tech corporations, however, had become huge financial operations that function without the restraints maintained on the large state-owned banks. In 2020, Alibaba, Tencent and Ant had a combined market capitalisation of nearly $2 trillion, far greater that the state-owned banks such as the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China.

In his public criticisms last October at the Bund Summit in Shanghai, Jack Ma lashed out at the strong “pawnshop” mentality of Chinese banks that demanded collateral and guarantees before lending. He called for reform to create a new, inclusive and universal banking system for small businesses and individuals.

Through the various arms of Alibaba, Ma had created a massive financial empire and was effectively demanding a further removal of regulatory restraints. Alibaba established Alipay as an online payment platform in 2004. By 2018, it had an estimated 870 million users, accounted for about 60 percent of the third-party payment market in China and provided some $300 billion in credit for business and consumer loans. As well as Alipay, Alibaba’s Ant Financial Services provided micro-financial services at high interest rates through various operations such as Yu’ebao, Ant Credit Pay, Ant Cash Now and Sesame Credit, in some cases in league with provincial governments seeking ways to circumvent central financial controls.

Amid fears about the already high levels of debt and the potential for financial instability, the CCP apparatus took action against Alibaba and Ma. The moves were also driven by political concerns that Ma and other tech magnates were closely associated with foreign capital and could use their resources, including their vast accumulations of data, to undermine or challenge CCP rule. According a list published late last year by the Chinese financial magazine Caixin, overseas shareholders in Ant held 52 percent of shares, of which financial groups on Wall Street and in London accounted for half. In March, Ma was ordered to divest himself of various media outlets, such as the South China Morning Post.

The unregulated financial operations of the tech corporations also threatened to generate social instability. In an essay entitled “China’s Economic Reckoning—The Price of Failed Reforms” in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Rosen explained: “In the early 2010s, these firms were given a free hand by party technocrats who hoped that financial innovations would force ossified state-owned banks to become more productive. This succeeded, at least in fits and starts: the new firms made the financial system work for previously underserved customers.

“But innovation also came with new risks, such as peer-to-peer lending platforms that offered high rates to depositors and even higher rates to borrowers. When many of the borrowers defaulted, investors protested, believing erroneously that the platforms were guaranteed by the government. In August 2018, thousands of people showed up in the heart of Beijing’s financial district to demand compensation. A regulatory crackdown on peer-to-peer lenders commenced, in a prelude to this year’s scrutiny of Ant Group.”

The CCP’s attempts to rein in the free-wheeling operations of some of the country’s largest corporations is not a sign of strength. Rather, it points to the extent of the economic, social and political crisis building up in China that will erupt in the not-too-distant future.

What starts in Afghanistan does not stay in Afghanistan: China, India, and Iran grapple with the fallout

James M. Dorsey

Taliban advances in Afghanistan shift the Central Asian playing field on which China, India and the United States compete with rival infrastructure-driven approaches. At first glance, a Taliban takeover of Kabul would give China a 2:0 advantage against the US and India, but that could prove to be a shaky head start.

The potential fall of the US-backed Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani will shelve if not kill Indian support for the Iranian port of Chabahar that was intended to facilitate Indian trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Chabahar was also viewed by India as a counterweight to the Chinese-supported Pakistani port of Gwadar, a crown jewel of the People’s Republic’s transportation, telecommunications and energy-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The United States facilitated Indian investment in Chabahar by exempting the port from harsh US sanctions against Iran. The exemption was intended to “support the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan.”

However, with negotiations with Iran about a revival of the 2015 international nuclear agreement stalled, the United States announced in July together with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan plans to create a platform that would foster regional trade, business ties and connectivity.

The connectivity end of the plan resembled an effort to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It would have circumvented Iran and weakened Chabahar but potentially strengthened China’s Gwadar alongside the port of Karachi.

That has become a moot point with the plans certain to be shelved as the Taliban move to take over Kabul and form a government that would be denied recognition by at least the democratic parts of the international community.

Like other Afghan neighbors, neither Pakistan nor Uzbekistan or for that matter China are likely to join a boycott of the Taliban. On the contrary, China last month made a point of giving a visiting Taliban delegation a warm welcome.

Recognition by Iran, Central Asian states and China of a Taliban government is however unlikely to be enough to salvage the Chabahar project. “Changed circumstances and alternative connectivity routes are being conjured up by other countries to make Chabahar irrelevant,” an Iranian source told Hard News and The Wire.

The Taliban have sought to reassure China, Iran, Uzbekistan and other Afghan neighbors that they will not allow Afghanistan to become an operational base for jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Uighur militants of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP).

The Taliban have positioned themselves as solely concerned with creating an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan and having no inclination to operate beyond the borders of the Central Asian state, but have been consistent in their refusal to expel Al Qaeda, even if the group is a shadow of what it was when it launched the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington 20 years ago.

The TIP has occasionally issued videos documenting its presence in Afghanistan but has, by and large, kept a low profile in the country and refrained from attacking Chinese targets in Afghanistan or across the border in Xinjiang, the north-western Chinese province in which authorities have brutally cracked down on ethnic Turkic Uighurs.

As a result, the Taliban reassurance was insufficient to stop China from repeatedly advising its citizens to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.

“Currently, the security situation in Afghanistan has further deteriorated … If Chinese citizens insist on staying in Afghanistan, they will face extremely high-security risks, and all the consequences will be borne by themselves,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.

The fallout of the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan, despite the group’s assurances, is likely to affect China beyond Afghan borders, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan, a major focus of the People’s Republic’s single largest Belt-and Road-related investment.

The investment has made China a target for attacks by militants primarily Baloch nationalists. However, the killing in July of nine Chinese nationals in an explosion on a bus transporting Chinese workers to the construction site of a dam in the northern mountains of Pakistan, a region more prone to attacks by religious militants, raises the specter of jihadists also targeting China. It was the highest loss of life of Chinese citizens in recent years in Pakistan.

The attack occurred amid fears that the Taliban will bolster ultra-conservative religious sentiment in Pakistan that celebrates the group as heroes whose success enhances the chances for austere religious rule in the world’s second-most populous Muslim-majority state.

“Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official.

Indicating Chinese concern, China has delayed the signing of a framework agreement on industrial cooperation that would have accelerated the implementation of projects that are part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Said scholar Kamran Bokhari: “Regime change is a terribly messy process. Weak regimes can be toppled; replacing them is the hard part. It is only a matter of time before the Afghan state collapses, unleashing chaos that will spill beyond its borders. All of Afghanistan’s neighbors will be affected to varying degrees, but Pakistan and China have the most to lose.”

The demise of Chabahar and/or the targeting by the Taliban of Hazara Shiites in Afghanistan could potentially turn Iran into a significant loser too.

Ashraf Ghani and the Fate of Afghanistan

Yanis Iqbal

On August 11, 2021, Pakistan’s Prime Minster Imran Khan said, “I tried to persuade the Taliban… three to four months back when they came here…The condition is that as long as [Afghanistan’s President] Ashraf Ghani is there, we [Taliban] are not going to talk to the Afghan government.” Three days later, news has arrived that Ghani is pondering over resignation, and may leave country with his family.

These unstable shifts are consequential. Taliban have entered the outskirts of Kabul with the second and third largest cities, Kandahar and Herat, under their control. As per UNHCR, more than 120,000 Afghans have fled the fighting in rural areas to seek refuge in Kabul. Ghani’s potential departure can modify these grim realities as Taliban leaders have previously said his removal is a pre-condition for ending the conflict.

In July 2021, a Taliban spokesman stated that if a mutually acceptable candidate was named to replace Ghani, the insurgents would be willing to lay down their weapons. Six months earlier, a leading Taliban negotiator had remarked that Ghani was “the only hurdle” to a successful settlement because the Taliban consider his 2019 election win to be a sham.

No Easy Victories

One may justifiably ask why Taliban would be interested in negotiations when an outright military victory seems to be on the horizon. First, any future Taliban regime would require recognition as well as support from major powers. Western and North American powers are fully aware of this fact, trying to leverage the Taliban to work with them rather than against them in the militant group’s own self-interest.

In the words of British Defense Minister Ben Wallace: “What [the Taliban] desperately want is international recognition. They need to unlock financing and support [for] nation-building, and you don’t do that with a terrorist balaclava on. You have to be a partner for peace, otherwise you risk isolation. Isolation led them to where they were last time.” The US and other nations have warned that Afghanistan would become a pariah state if Taliban seek a military victory.

Second, Taliban know that an endless pursuit of territorial gains carries within it the possibility of an endless civil war that could threaten the region and thus make other nations withhold recognition. USA’s deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships – on top of the continuing presence of military contractors and more than 1,000 US troops – is already spreading turmoil in Afghanistan and complicating any optimistic prospect of a neat Taliban takeover.

Blowbacks

A central factor accelerating the above mentioned two tendencies is the fluctuating Afghan strategy of Pakistan – the primary benefactor of Taliban. Islamabad raised Taliban so that it could a) offer “strategic depth” against India, providing territory and airspace to accommodate the retreat and recuperation of Pakistani troops in case of a confrontation with India; and b) recognize the Durand Line and curb the undercurrents of Pashtun nationalism in the northwest frontier.

Taliban did not prove to be an easy proxy for Pakistan, generating severe blowbacks for the latter. During its brief rule over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the jihadist organization not only refused to recognize the Durand Line, but went on to foster Pashtun nationalism, albeit of an Islamic character, which fanned the flames of nationalist sentiments within the Pakistani Pashtuns.

Between 2004 and 2006, General Pervaiz Musharraf sent the Pakistani Army nine times into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – the seven mountainous sectors outside the jurisdiction of the North-West Frontier Province – to restrict Taliban penetration and prevent Pakistani Pashtuns from crossing the Durand Line to resist Western troops, who were engaged in the War on Terror.

These unthinking, interventionist tactics engendered solidarity with the Afghan resistance. This led in December 2007 to the formation of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a murderous home-grown guerrilla intent on returning the war to Islamabad itself. TTP traces its origin to the anti-communist Afghan jihad of the 1980s and 1990s, which gave rise to some Arab mujahedeen from Saudi Arabia who severed themselves from the Wahhabi school of thought.

They formed their own school, which they called Takfiri, far more dogmatic than Wahhabism. Takfiri comes from the Arabic word Takhfir, which is derived from Kafir, or impiety. To declare someone Takhfir is to claim that they are apostates, and so deserving of death. The Takfiri group formed its foundations in Dir district of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan and Jalalabad City in Afghanistan. It was finally driven out of Pakistan, but not defeated, after thousands of deaths and millions of dollars.

With Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, TTP has been given a new lease of life. Flag-bearing Taliban rallies have been seen in Quetta, Peshawar, and other cities. In July 2021, TTP chief Noor Wali Mehsud declared in an interview with CNN that his group aims to make the tribal districts of Pakistan – along the Afghan border – independent. He also claimed that the TTP could take back control of the Pakistani tribal areas if forced to leave Afghanistan.

This indicates an ideological retooling of the TTP. Earlier, the group used to take its inspiration from al-Qaeda, aspiring to build an Islamic order in the entire country. Now, it has developed nationalist credentials, evidencing Taliban’s influence. These inter-jihadist links have spelt trouble for Pakistan.

Oscillation

For Pakistan, a Taliban military triumph would reduce the latter’s dependence on Islamabad, encouraging the jihadists to pursue independent policies, like allowing Pashtun nationalist factions to make irredentist claims. Moreover, a Taliban battlefield victory would have what the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) has called an “emboldenment effect”. The fanaticism of Pakistan-based religious parties and clerics would be activated, unleashing attacks by anti-Pakistan militants inside Pakistan’s borders.

To avoid the adverse effects of a total Taliban win, Pakistan wants the group to be part of an intra-Afghan power-sharing arrangement which would prevent the former from monopolizing power. Ghani’s presidential retirement would pave the way for this strategic avenue, enabling Pakistan to get rid of the vagaries associated with a strengthened Taliban. The successful implementation of this oscillating Pakistani plan depends on the extent to which Taliban is conscious of their international perception.

The Taliban take Kabul

Binoy Kampmark

It unfolded as a story of fleeing.  The Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, taking flight to Tajikistan, giving little clue of his intentions to colleagues.  The fleeing of the infamous Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord assured to fight another day. The fleeing of tens of thousands of residents out of the city of Kabul, long seen as beyond the reach of insurgents.  The fleeing of Coalition embassy personnel, aided by freshly deployed troops from the United States and the UK sent into Afghanistan as a matter of urgency. The Taliban had taken Kabul.

In departing and leaving stranded colleagues to their fate, the bookish Ghani, preferring pen to gun, had time to leave a message on Facebook.  One could never accuse the man of having wells of courage. He reflected on either facing armed Taliban fighters or leaving his beloved country.  In order to avoid immolating Kabul, which “would have been a big human disaster”, he chose a hasty exit.

Only a few days prior, on August 11, Ghani had flown to Mazar-i-Sharif, in the company of the blood lusty Uzbek Dostum, supposedly to hold the fort against the Taliban with another warlord, the ethnic Tajik Atta Muhammad Noor.  Noor had pledged in June to mobilise the citizenry of Balkh province to fight the Taliban.  “God forbid, the fall of Balkh,” he declared at the time, “means the fall of the north and the fall of the north means the fall of Afghanistan.”

This was not a move greeted with universal joy.  Habib-ur-Rahman of the leadership council of the political and paramilitary group Hizb-e-Islami saw a bit of self-aggrandizing at work, hardly remarkable for a warlord keen to oversee his bit of real estate.  “The mobilisation of the people by politicians under the pretext of supporting security forces – with the use of public uprising forces – fuels the war from one side and from the other it affects Afghanistan’s stance in foreign policy.”

The shoring up mission led by Ghani would do little to conceal the historical differences between Noor and Dostum.  The former had done battle with Dostum’s troops during the latter’s time as a regional commander in the ailing Soviet-backed Afghan government.  Dostum’s defection from the government (one spots the common theme) in 1992 to form the Junbish-e-Milli party presented Noor with a chance to join forces.  But the Tajik left Dostum in 1993 citing irreconcilable ideological differences.  With the initial defeat of the Taliban, Noor triumphed in several military encounters with the frustrated Uzbek, seizing the Balkh province in its entirety.

The accord reached between the parties on this occasion certainly did not involve agreeing to fight the Taliban.  Both had come to the conclusion that scurrying to Uzbekistan was a sounder proposition.  Noor subsequently justified the measure by claiming enigmatically that, “They had orchestrated the plot to trap Marshal Dostum and myself too, but they didn’t succeed.”  Ghani would soon follow.

Members of Ghani’s imploding government have not taken kindly to the flight of their leader.  “Curse Ghani and his gang,” wrote acting defence minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi.  “They tied our hands from behind and sold the country.”

The head of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah also released a video withering in announcing that, “The former president of Afghanistan” had “left the country in this difficult situation.”  God, he suggested, “should hold him accountable.”  Abdullah, along with former President Harmid Karzai and Hizb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are currently in negotiations with the Taliban over the formal transfer of power.

The US and UK have deployed personnel in a hurried panic.  Over the weekend, President Joe Biden, in announcing the deployment of 5,000 troops, told the press that they would ensure “we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.”  Another thousand have also been added to the complement.

There was much embarrassment in all of this.  The US and its allies made the fundamental error that training, money and expertise would somehow miraculously guarantee the stability, continuity and reliability of a ramshackle regime.  Biden, in coming up with his own phraseology, had stated that a Taliban victory was “not inevitable”.  In July, we were given a nugget of Bidenese that, while he had little trust for the Taliban, he did “trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- – more competent in terms of conducting war.”

As the Taliban was securing the capital, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken parried evident parallels with the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.  “This is manifestly not Saigon,” he said with little conviction.

Now, the scene was one of grave, turbaned and bearded men, armed to the teeth, overseeing the desk which Ghani previously occupied in the presidential palace.  They had survived and outwitted an army better armed and supposedly better trained. They had survived airstrikes launched from within the country and from bases in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, via heavy bombers and lethal drones.  They had survived the forces of the US, NATO and rival militias.

They now find themselves in control of an entity they wish to be recognised as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.  History has come in its full violent circle.  A group of insurgents dismissed as fundamentalist mountain savages who would be vanquished before the modernising incentives of the West have shown up, as previous Afghan fighters have, the futility and sheer folly of meddling in their country’s affairs.

Scale of forest fire devastation in Greece threatens to ignite social and political unrest

John Vassilopoulos

Over 100,000 hectares of forest and farmland were razed to the ground in Greece between July 29 and August 12, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

The EFFIS report lays bare the scale of destruction unleashed by forest fires ravaging parts of Greece since the start of the month. The figure accounts for 90 percent of all land destroyed by fire since the beginning of the year and dwarfs the average 2,750 hectares that were burnt over the same period each year between 2008 and 2020.

The brunt of destruction has been borne by the northern part of the island of Evia, off the north-east coast of Attica, which encompasses Athens. At least 50,000 hectares have burnt since the start of August, according to a survey of satellite images carried out by Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation programme. The fire in Evia has been described as the biggest in modern Greek history.

A man runs as fire burns trees in Kirinthos village on the island of Evia, about 135 kilometers (84 miles) north of Athens, Greece, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Thodoris Nikolaou)

The ferocity of the fires was fueled by record high temperatures in Greece over the previous week as the country suffered its worst heatwave in 30 years with temperatures staying above 40 degrees celsius for extended periods.

In his address to the nation last week, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis sought to absolve his government of any responsibility for the disaster. Feigning sympathy with the thousands who have lost their homes and properties, he insisted that country was “facing a natural disaster of unprecedented dimensions” and firefighters were in a battle with “supernatural powers that often exceed their strength”.

There is no doubt that climate change is the chief cause of the fires. But events have not taken place in a vacuum. Both climate change and the inability of essential services to respond to its deadly effects are the consequence of the anarchic capitalist mode of production, which considers the destruction of the environment as one of the costs of doing business.

It wasn’t “supernatural powers” that hampered the response of firefighters but a decade of austerity which has decimated the fire service. Between 2020 and 2010 a total of €1.1 billion has been cut from forest protection and forest fire service due to successive bailout packages signed by the Greek government at the behest of the European Union and International Monetary Fund. The trend has continued, after forest protection agencies were only awarded a paltry €1.7 million for the year despite having requested €17 million.

The results are devastating. Ranger Stations in Greece are woefully understaffed with many, such as that on Mount Parnitha near Athens where a fire broke out this month, without a single full-time forest ranger on site. The fire service is reportedly understaffed by 4,000 personnel, with an over-reliance on seasonal and volunteer fire-fighters while the average age of full-time firefighters is 45.

The lack of fire-fighters was denounced by residents on live television, many of whom were forced to evacuate or were left to battle the flames on their own. The deputy mayor of the village of Afidnes, 27 kilometres north of Athens, where a fire broke out in the first week of the month, angrily exclaimed on Open TV, “There has not been a single fire engine here for three hours. Three hours we’ve been pleading! The fire is out of control and we don’t have the means to control it. The only people battling the fire are [volunteer fire fighter units]. They have sent us 1,000 police officers who are not doing anything! I want firefighters to save the village, whatever can be salvaged, because the fire has entered the village.”

Another indication of chronic underfunding are outdated fire fighting vehicles, with only 15 percent being 10 years old or less. The most striking example are the 18 Canadair fire-fighter planes in Greece’s fleet, most of which date back to 1979, with no new models purchased since 2000. Due to frequent breakdowns and repairs, a significant number of the planes are grounded at any one time. A former Canadair pilot told online news site news247.gr, “The Canadair planes can in theory fly from sunrise to sundown, but the ones we have in Greece are very old and don’t have that capability. Think about the fact there was problems with them when I was flying them in the 90s and since then 30 years have passed.”

Another issue limiting the effectiveness of the older Canadair planes is the fact that their engines are not designed to operate in temperatures above 38 degrees, hampering their ability to fly during heatwave temperatures when the fires were raging.

With anger seething among Greek workers, the pseudo-left opposition party Syriza has stepped in to contain it. In a press conference this week Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras stated that the government bears “criminal responsibility” for the disaster, but refused to call for its removal, stating that he would not follow the “well-worn path” of calling for “resignations”. He called instead for unity and the establishment of a cross-party national plan to combat climate change, as well as the adoption of Syriza’s proposals to overhaul, modernise and better co-ordinate the country’s disaster response. Such posturing costs Tsipras nothing and is in stark contrast to its own record in government.

Junking its massive popular mandate to end austerity in the summer of 2015, after being swept into power at the start of that year, Tsipras’ government signed a third bailout package from the EU, IMF and European Central Bank which depended on making even deeper cuts to the country’s budget.

Moreover, Tsipras and his party, which has long presented itself as a fervent defender of the environment, bear their own “criminal responsibility” for the forest fire in the summer of 2018 at Mati, a small coastal town a few kilometres outside of Athens, in which over 100 lost their lives. Its only action was the convening of an independent enquiry into the disaster, whose findings were published at the start of 2019, a few months before elections that Tsipras knew he would lose.

Kicking the ball down the road by convening an inquiry will no doubt be a move followed by the current New Democracy government, with Mitsotakis vaguely stating that “any failures [in the government’s response] will be identified”. Even his commitment that all forest land burnt will be earmarked for re-foresting cannot be believed. Much of Greece’s forest land is not formally defined as such, which has resulted in their status being disputed over the years. On August 6, one day after Mitsotakis proclaimed his commitment to reforestation, the status of a forest which was burnt in 2012 near the town of Kastri on the island of Crete was revoked, overturning a pledge by the local authority to re-forest the area.

Seeking to deflect attention from the government, Attica Prefect Giorgos Patoulis, a member of the ruling New Democracy Party, was one of many local authority politicians who raised the possibility of an organised plan of arson. In addition, an editorial in the conservative Estia, Greece’s oldest daily, lent credence to conspiracy theories that the Turkish Secret Service might be behind the fires.

The government has declared its commitment to make arson a felony offence, while Supreme Court Prosecutor Vassilis Pliotas has ordered an inquiry into the possibility of an organised arson attack.

This campaign has been accompanied by media reports of people arrested for suspected arson, many of whom were released due to lack of evidence. Many reports focused on the case of an Afghan refugee woman who attempted to burn trees in the grove around the Pedion Tou Areos park in the centre of Athens on August 6. The notion that she was part of some criminal conspiracy is refuted by her suffering from mental health problems. The fire was quickly extinguished and was a non-event, compared to the infernos that raged throughout the country.

The attempt of the government to blame arson for the fires should be taken as a warning. An editorial in Estia declared that the country had “entered unchartered waters which may result in social unrest”. The editorial revealed that some government officials had advised the prime minister to invoke Article 48 of the constitution which officially proclaims a “state of siege”, giving him the power to suspend parts of the constitution and rule by decree in what Estia termed a regime of “democratic dictatorship”.

While ND’s spokesman Tassos Gaitanis dismissed such claims as “farcical”, they are in line with the government’s drive towards authoritarianism as shown by the draconian anti-protest legislation passed by the government last year .

A recent report by Amnesty International documented increased police brutality in the wake of the new legislation and under the guise of a second lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19. According to the report, “In November and December 2020, the Greek authorities penalized peaceful protesters or individuals calling for participation in peaceful protests. Human rights lawyers, women’s rights defenders, trade unionists and members of political parties were arbitrarily arrested and criminalized for allegedly breaching public health rules and were handed unjustified administrative fines.”

Thousands feared dead as devastating earthquake hits Haiti

Richard Dufour

Haiti was hit Saturday morning by an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. Official reports currently place the number of fatalities at more than 700, but thousands remain unaccounted for, meaning the death toll will in all likelihood rise dramatically in coming days.

The long tremor was felt throughout the country, with its epicenter located near the city of Saint-Louis-du-Sud, 100 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

In 2010, Port-au-Prince was devastated by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people, injured even more, and displaced 1.5 million. The poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti has yet to recover from that disaster.

A family eats breakfast in front of homes destroyed by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

Even though the densely populated capital was spared this time, the toll from the latest earthquake in terms of deaths, injuries and material damage will nonetheless be high. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) issued a “red alert” for the disaster and estimated that fatalities could reach into the thousands. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” the USGS said.

In the southwestern peninsula, the hardest hit region of the country, the earthquake damaged or flattened many buildings, including churches and hotels, trapped people under debris and caused flooding after underground pipes ruptured. The largest city in the region, Les Cayes, with a population of 150,000, saw the collapse of several buildings, including the largest supermarket, jeopardizing the supply of food and other necessities to residents.

Complicating search and rescue efforts, a mountain road connecting Les Cayes to the peninsula’s second-largest city, Jeremie, has been cut off by boulders after major landslides and rockfalls that were triggered by the earthquake. The main public hospital in Jeremie, with a population of 130,000, rapidly filled to capacity with people with broken limbs, said Ricardo Chery, a local journalist. “The roof of the cathedral fell down,” said Job Joseph, a resident.

The official provisional death toll is already severe. According to a communiqué issued by the Haitian Civil Protection agency, 724 people are confirmed dead and more than 2,800 are injured. Its director, Jerry Chandler, said that the few existing hospitals in the region are struggling to provide emergency care. At least three hospitals, in the communes of Pestel, Corailles and Roseaux, are completely saturated with victims.

The communiqué reports that at least 949 houses, seven churches, two hotels and three schools were destroyed, while 723 houses, a prison, three medical centers and seven schools were damaged. Port, airport and telecommunications infrastructure, however, are said to have not been badly damaged.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was appointed after last month’s murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, has declared a month-long state of emergency. But there has been little government help on the ground.

Rescue operations, carried out by the local population with their bare hands or with makeshift means, could be complicated by tropical storm Grace, which is expected to hit the country Monday evening. Significant rainfall could create mudslides and further destabilize buildings.

While Haiti has been repeatedly hit by disasters of a natural origin, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, their catastrophic impact is bound up with the conditions of abject poverty, endemic corruption, unending political instability and profound socio-economic crisis that are the legacy of decades of imperialist oppression, above all at the hands of US imperialism.

Swaths of the Haitian population face grinding poverty and hunger, and the country’s meager health care services are overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Caribbean nation of 11 million has been in the throes of a political crisis since Moïse was assassinated on July 7 in what appears to have been an operation ordered by a rival faction of Haiti’s corrupt, pro-imperialist ruling elite. Citing concerns for his safety and a lack of security, the judge placed in charge of further investigating the assassination plot and bringing charges against those arrested withdrew on Friday.

The emergency response to the earthquake has been made even more complicated because road access to the peninsula region struck by the quake has been cut off by violent armed gang warfare at the southern entrance to Haiti’s capital. With the support of competing sections of the Haitian elite vying for power, criminal gangs have proliferated as instruments for the violent suppression of the Haitian working class and oppressed masses.

In a thoroughly cynical statement issued Saturday, US President Joe Biden claimed that “The United States remains a close and enduring friend to the people of Haiti” and “will be there in the aftermath of this tragedy.”

What hypocrisy! Since its first invasion of Haiti in 1915, US imperialism has a record of ruthlessly suppressing popular opposition to the imperialist dominance of the island nation. For three decades during the 20th century, Washington backed the brutal Duvalier dictatorship. In 2004, American troops intervened at the head of an international military invasion to oust the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and initiate more than a decade of neocolonial-style occupation by forces organized under the auspices of the United Nations.

The point-person who Biden has named to supervise the latest US “support” effort, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, is one of the leading political-ideological proponents of “human rights” imperialism. She played a major role within the Obama administration in pressing for the US regime-change war in Libya, a brutal air war that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and plunged the North African country into a bloody civil war that continues to rage a decade later.

The type of “support” the Haitian people can expect from the Washington is exemplified by its response to the last major earthquake in 2010.

Under conditions of a popular groundswell of international sympathy and support for the Haitian people, Washington and its allies made a show of providing assistance to Haiti. International donors pledged $10.4 billion for Haiti, including $3.9 billion from the US. But while feigning humanitarian concerns, the western powers, led by the US, Canada, and France, pursued entirely predatory objectives. These included: propping up a puppet regime capable of maintaining political “stability,” that is subjugating Haiti’s impoverished masses; providing political cover for the brutal treatment and expulsion of Haitian refugees; and promoting Haiti as a cheap labor producer for the international garment and other industries (the Caracol project).

The chief figure overseeing this relief effort was former US President Bill Clinton.

In the ensuing decade, the Haitian masses saw very little of this money. The lion’s share of it was sucked up by the major transnational corporations in charge of “reconstruction” projects and by the handsomely-paid bureaucracy of various international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). What little found its way into the country itself was gobbled up by various sections of the venal Haitian ruling class.

A high point in these sordid relations was the 2010-2011 presidential elections, which saw Hillary Clinton’s State Department intervene to install Michel Martelly as Haiti’s next president, a right-wing musician with close ties to the former Duvalier dictatorship. Before Clinton’s intervention, Martelly had placed third in the first round of the elections and would have been excluded from the second round, which was limited to the top two vote winners.

Martelly’s chosen successor was a little-known businessman, Jovenel Moïse, who came to power in rigged elections, again with US support. Moïse went on to head a corrupt, right-wing government that depended on political support from Washington and on armed criminal gangs at home to bloodily suppress growing popular opposition to its IMF-dictated austerity policies. This earned him the hatred of the population. Following Moise’s assassination last July, and amid a bitter power conflict within Haiti’s political elite, Henry was hand-picked by the United States, France, Canada, and the other members of the so-called “Core Group” of nations to take over.

Today, just as in 2010, Haiti remains the poorest and most socially unequal country in the Western Hemisphere. While the masses of Haiti remain mired in poverty, the former US president and his wife Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, have seen their own wealth soar, raking in an estimated $230 million in income since Bill Clinton left the White House.