The Return of the Taliban 20 Years Later

Vijay Prashad

On August 15, the Taliban arrived in Kabul. The Taliban’s leadership entered the presidential palace, which Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had vacated when he fled into exile abroad hours before. The country’s borders shut down and Kabul’s main international airport lay silent, except for the cries of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. and NATO; they knew that their lives would now be at serious risk. The Taliban’s leadership, meanwhile, tried to reassure the public of a “peaceful transition” by saying in several statements that they would not seek retribution, but would go after corruption and lawlessness.

The Taliban’s Entry in Kabul Is a Defeat for the United States

In recent years, the United States has failed to accomplish any of the objectives of its wars. The U.S. entered Afghanistan with horrendous bombing and a lawless campaign of extraordinary rendition in October 2001 with the objective of ejecting the Taliban from the country; now, 20 years later, the Taliban is back. In 2003, two years after the U.S. unleashed a war in Afghanistan, it opened an illegal war against Iraq, which ultimately resulted in an unconditional withdrawal of the United States in 2011 after the refusal by the Iraqi parliament to allow U.S. troops extralegal protections. As the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it opened a terrible war against Libya in 2011, which resulted in the creation of chaos in the region.

Not one of these wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—resulted in the creation of a pro-U.S. government. Each of these wars created needless suffering for the civilian populations. Millions of people had their lives disrupted, while hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in these senseless wars. What faith in humanity can now be expected from a young person in Jalalabad or in Sirte? Will they now turn inward, fearing that any possibility of change has been seized from them by the barbaric wars inflicted upon them and other residents of their countries?

There is no question that the United States continues to have the world’s largest military and that by using its base structure and its aerial and naval power, the U.S. can strike any country at any time. But what is the point of bombing a country if that violence attains no political ends? The U.S. used its advanced drones to assassinate the Taliban leaders, but for each leader that it killed, another half a dozen have emerged. Besides, the men in charge of the Taliban now—including the co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—were there from the start; it would never have been possible to decapitate the entire Taliban leadership. More than $2 trillion has been spent by the United States on a war that it knew could not be won.

Corruption Was the Trojan Horse

In early statements, Mullah Baradar said that his government will focus its attention on the endemic corruption in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, stories spread across Kabul about ministers of Ashraf Ghani’s government attempting to leave the country in cars filled with dollar bills, which was supposed to be the money that was provided by the U.S. to Afghanistan for aid and infrastructure. The drain of wealth from the aid given to the country has been significant. In a 2016 report by the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) relating to the “Lessons Learned from the U.S. Experience with Corruption in Afghanistan,” the investigators write, “Corruption significantly undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by damaging the legitimacy of the Afghan government, strengthening popular support for the insurgency, and channeling material resources to insurgent groups.” SIGAR created a “gallery of greed,” which listed U.S. contractors who siphoned aid money and pocketed it through fraud. More than $2 trillion has been spent on the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but it went neither to provide relief nor to build the country’s infrastructure. The money fattened the rich in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Corruption at the very top of the government depleted morale below. The U.S. pinned its hopes on the training of 300,000 soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA), spending $88 billion on this pursuit. In 2019, a purge of “ghost soldiers” in the rolls—soldiers who did not exist—led to the loss of 42,000 troops; it is likely that the number might have been higher. Morale in the ANA has plunged over the past few years, with defections from the army to other forces escalating. Defense of the provincial capitals was also weak, with Kabul falling to the Taliban almost without a fight.

To this end, the recently appointed defense minister to the Ghani government, General Bismillah Mohammadi, commented on Twitter about the governments that have been in power in Afghanistan since late 2001, “They tied our hands behind our backs and sold the homeland. Damn the rich man [Ghani] and his people.” This captures the popular mood in Afghanistan right now.

Afghanistan and Its Neighbors

Hours after taking power, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s political office, Dr. M. Naeem, said that all embassies will be protected, while another spokesperson for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that all former government officials did not need to fear for their lives. These are reassuring messages for now.

It has also been reassuring that the Taliban has said that it is not averse to a government of national unity, although there should be no doubt that such a government would be a rubber stamp for the Taliban’s own political agenda. So far, the Taliban has not articulated a plan for Afghanistan, which is something that the country has needed for at least a generation.

On July 28, Taliban leader Mullah Baradar met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin, China. The outlines of the discussion have not been fully revealed, but what is known is that the Chinese extracted a promise from the Taliban not to allow attacks on China from Afghanistan and not to allow attacks on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure in Central Asia. In return, China would continue its BRI investments in the region, including in Pakistan, which is a key Taliban supporter.

Whether or not the Taliban will be able to control extremist groups is not clear, but what is abundantly clear—in the absence of any credible Afghan opposition to the Taliban—is that the regional powers will have to exert their influence on Kabul to ameliorate the harsh program of the Taliban and its history of support for extremist groups. For instance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (set up in 2001) revived in 2017 its Afghanistan Contact Group, which held a meeting in Dushanbe in July 2021, and called for a national unity government.

At that meeting, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar laid out a three-point plan, which achieved near consensus among the fractious neighbors:

“1. An independent, neutral, unified, peaceful, democratic and prosperous nation.

“2. Ceasing violence and terrorist attacks against civilians and state representatives, settle conflict through political dialogue, and respect interests of all ethnic groups, and

“3. Ensure that neighbors are not threatened by terrorism, separatism and extremism.”

That’s the most that can be expected at this moment. The plan promises peace, which is a great advance from what the people of Afghanistan have experienced over the past decades. But what kind of peace? This “peace” does not include the rights of women and children to a world of possibilities. During 20 years of the U.S. occupation, that “peace” was not in evidence either. This peace has no real political power behind it, but there are social movements beneath the surface that might emerge to put such a definition of “peace” on the table. Hope lies there.

Celebrate the Heroes Who Warned Us That Afghanistan Would Be a Disaster

Ted Rall

Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Afghans, $2 trillion down the toilet, a Taliban victory that leaves America’s international reputation in shambles. This disaster didn’t happen by itself. Political and military leaders, aided and abetted by the news media, are responsible and should be held accountable. Voters let themselves be led by the nose—and they should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror because what they did and didn’t do caused many people to die.

Antiwar heroes deserve recognition and respect for telling us not to go into Afghanistan and, after we did, to get out despite being marginalized and ridiculed. They were lonely. Despite widespread reports of casualties among Afghan civilians and the glaring fact that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11, 88% of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—supported George W. Bush’s war three weeks after U.S. bombs began raining down on Kabul.

Let’s celebrate the good guys.

During the fall of 2001 tens of thousands of demonstrators marched against the war in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other U.S. cities. The marchers were too few and too peaceful to move the needle. But the judgment of history is now final: the tiny minority who opposed invading Afghanistan were morally upright and correctly skeptical about the outcome. If you know any of these true American heroes, thank them for their service and buy them a drink.

While nationalist nimrods drove around with their cars idiotically festooned by American flags, intelligent ethical individuals spoke out for what was right. “Under the [U.N.] charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the [U.N.] Security Council approves,” said Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild. “Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men —15 from Saudi Arabia — did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the U.S. or another U.N. member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The U.S. war in Afghanistan is illegal.”

All 98 senators present, including Bernie Sanders, voted to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and install the puppet regime whose corruption led to the Taliban takeover. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 420 to 1. There was only one sane, only one correct voice in opposition in the entire Congress: Barbara Lee of California. “As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she implored.

“For her lone stance,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2016, “[Representative] Lee was deluged with rancid insults and death threats to the point where she needed around-the-clock bodyguards. She was vilified as ‘anti-American’ by numerous outlets including the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times editorialized on September 18 that ‘Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies — from Fidel Castro on down’ and that ‘while most of the left-wing Democrats spent the week praising President Bush and trying to sound as moderate as possible, Barbara Lee continued to sail under her true colors.’ Since then, she has been repeatedly rejected in her bids to join the House Democratic leadership, typically losing to candidates close to Wall Street and in support of militarism.” Two years later, pro-war Democrats denied her yet another post, as chairperson of their House caucus, to punish her for voting against the Afghan war.

Every congressman and senator who voted for this stupid Afghanistan war is a fool who should resign at once.

Americans who supported this stupid Afghanistan war should refrain from voting ever again.

Media outlets that editorialized in favor of this stupid Afghanistan war deserve to go out of business.

American history has been defined by war, mostly illegally and unjustified on the part of the United States government. That history will continue unless we recognize, elevate and employ the voices of people who speak out against stupid wars before they start.

UK Parliament mourns imperialism’s Afghan debacle

Chris Marsden

Yesterday’s UK parliamentary debate on Afghanistan had a funereal air, punctuated by bitter cries of betrayal from the Conservative government benches that were replicated by Labour MPs.

A collective howl of anguish, despite inevitable references to the fate of women, girls, gays and the Afghan people under the Taliban, was motivated solely by the defeat suffered by British imperialism.

The anger of the criminals and blowhards in the House of Commons was directed as much against the United States as the Taliban, with denunciations of both the Biden and Trump administrations. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his key frontbench team were denounced from the right, not the left, for relying too much on Washington and not being able to independently project Britain’s predatory ambitions on the world arena.

The rout in Afghanistan has assumed a significance similar to if not greater than the Suez crisis in 1956, as a symbol of British imperialism’s decline and the desperate need to claw back a place in the sun even in defiance of US imperialism.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaking in Parliament (credit: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor)

Johnson exhibited no trace of his usual bravado. He tried to placate his critics by praising the supposed “achievements” of the 20 years of war and occupation of Afghanistan, while bluntly stating the military and political realities facing the UK.

Replying to hostile questions from his predecessor as Tory leader, Theresa May, he said that the UK “came up against hard reality”. Afghanistan was an occupation led by the US, which could not continue without US military might once President Donald Trump announced a pull-out last year and President Joe Biden carried it through last week. No matter the sincerity of those calling for a non-US led military response, there was no appetite among any of the UK’s other partners for a “continued military presence” and hadn’t been since the official combat mission ended in 2018.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s reply began with a hymn of praise to the occupation of Afghanistan. A “disastrous week, an unfolding tragedy” should not detract from the fact that, instead of rule by the Taliban, “a fragile democracy emerged.” By “no means perfect,” it had prevented “international terrorist attacks,” won “liberty” for women and allowed Afghans “to dream of a better future.”

These boons were all won by the “sacrifice by the Afghan people” and “over 150,000 UK personnel… including members across this house.”

Speaking to the military, Starmer emoted, “Your sacrifice was not in vain, you brought stability, reduced the terrorist threat and enabled progress. We are all proud of what you did.” He reiterated the trope of every right-wing demagogue in history, including Hitler, of a betrayal of those whose “sacrifice deserves better than this,” thanks to the “staggering complacency from our government about the Taliban threat.” Johnson, he added, was “a threat to national security”

When Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith asked Starmer whether he agreed that Biden’s statement blaming Afghan forces for not fighting the Taliban was “shameful”, he agreed “that’s wrong.”

The tone set by Starmer was continued by the Tories, starting with May who said, “We all understand the importance of American support, but I do find it incomprehensible and worrying that the UK was not able to bring together an alternative alliance of countries to continue to provide the support necessary to sustain a government in Afghanistan… I am afraid I think this has been a major setback for British foreign policy.”

Things reached a new low with every speech by an MP who has served in the armed forces. Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugenhadt, a former officer in the intelligence corps in Iraq and then Afghanistan, was treated to silent awe by MPs. He attacked Biden’s calling “into question the courage of men I fought with” once again as “shameful,” continuing, “Those who have not fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.”

He called on the UK to “make sure that we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, that that we can work together with Japan and Australia, France and Germany, with partners large and small and make sure we hold the line together.” His “emotional” diatribe won a round of applause.

Tobias Elwood, chair of the defence select committee and a former captain in the Royal Green Jackets, said he regretted there would be no vote today that would show the government did not have the support of parliament. The UK should have more confidence to pursue its own strategy. “We have the means, the hard power, the connections to lead. What we require is the backbone.”

Johnny Mercer, a former Army captain, declared that people who sign up for the military “do not serve the American flag, they serve the British flag. It dishonours their service to simply say: the Americans have left, we are leaving.” Soldiers are not trained to lose, and “we're not trained for ministers to, in a way, choose to be defeated by the Taliban”.

Not to be outdone, Labour’s Dan Jarvis, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and member of the parachute Regiment, asked of Afghan army personnel, “Where were we in their hour of need? We were nowhere, that was shameful”.

One Blairite scoundrel after another sought to demonstrate their jingoistic bona fides. Former Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper added “disturbing” and “distressful” to the now obligatory “shameful” in her description of events. Chris Bryant referenced the plight of gay men to bemoan “the most sudden collapse of any foreign and military policy objective on the part of the UK since Suez, and you might argue further back.”

Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said, “This is an unparalleled moment of shame for this government,” which was “behaving as if they have no agency and no power… We have so much to be proud of as a country, Mr Speaker. Can it again include our government?”

What then of those who are supposed to stem this tide of nationalist warmongering and cut through the lying defences of a filthy war of colonial conquest? Ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having participated in a small demonstration by the Stop The War Coalition outside parliament along with a handful of Labour “left” MPs, strained every sinew in his efforts not to unduly antagonise his audience.

After calling on the UK to allow all Afghan collaborators with the occupation into the country, he advanced a critique of the war that never mentioned anyone involved in starting it or waging it for two decades—including Labour’s former leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—and certainly nothing critical of Starmer and company.

He offered instead a history lesson that proves wars in Afghanistan “do fail… three in the 19th century and a number in this century.” There were, he concluded, “some serious historical lessons to be learned here about how we take major foreign policy decisions” and a need for “sober reflection on the disaster which has happened in Afghanistan.”

The debacle in Afghanistan, following on from Iraq, Libya and Syria, the desperate crisis provoked by Brexit, and the protracted economic and social tensions amplified by the pandemic, have derailed the strategic ambitions of British imperialism. Its political representatives gathered in Westminster yesterday have all but lost their heads in response, dreaming of a return to the glory days of Empire just as darkness is falling.

Outside of parliament, meanwhile, millions of working people opposed to these wars, who see these same MPs as the architects of their own hardship and suffering, will come to see the debacle in Afghanistan as an indication that they too can challenge and defeat Britain’s “mighty” ruling elite.

2020 US census: Americans calling themselves multiracial surged by 276 percent

Gabriel Black

Last week, the US Census Bureau released new findings from the 2020 census conducted last year. The report is one in a series of ongoing releases from the bureau as it analyzes its data. Last week’s report concerns the geographic distribution of the population, the self-identified racial and ethnic background of respondents, age distribution and housing stock.

Most corporate media outlets in their presentation of the report presented its findings in racialist terms, drawing particular attention to the first-ever decline of self-identified “whites” and the increase of “non-whites.” The data, however, considered objectively, undercuts the claim that the basic category of US society is race rather than socio-economic class, and that America is a “white supremacist” society as a result of endemic white racism.

Rather, the data, tracking the changes over the ten-year period since the last census, reveals an accelerating movement of the population from rural areas to major cities, associated with a growth of the working class, and an increasing internationalization and intermixing of different racial, ethnic and national groups.

In other words, racial and ethnic divisions are breaking down, rather than being reinforced by intrinsic differences based on skin color or some other identity trait.

The data shows that as the urban working class has grown, numerically and as a percentage of the population, so too has its multi-racial character. People who do not consider themselves to be of any single race are driving population growth, as urban workers increasingly intermingle, intermarry and raise children with people from entirely different national, ethnic and racial backgrounds.

The racial-ethnic category that registered the biggest increase, by far, was that for people who identified themselves as multi-racial, which rose by 276 percent.

A growing urban working class

The first trend to which the census points is the massive growth of the urban population between 2010 and 2020, as rural people increasingly migrated to major metropoles, especially in the Southwest and Western United States.

Marc Perry, a demographer with the US Census, stated, “Population growth this decade was almost entirely in metro areas.” Metropolitan areas, on average, grew by 9 percent over the last 10 years, while smaller counties grew only by 1 percent. More than half of the nation’s counties did not see any growth, and 52 percent of all counties lost population.

The trend points to the continuation of a process that has spanned the last two-and-a-half centuries: the decline of rural life—especially the ranks of small farmers—as the society became increasingly dominated numerically by an urban and suburban working class. Eighty-six percent of the American population now lives in urban areas.

The breaking down of racial categories

The second major finding to which the census points is the increasingly multi-racial character of the population, as many of these urban workers meet, fall in love and have children with people from different ethnic and national backgrounds.

In 2010, about 9 million people identified themselves as being of multiple races. In 2020, 33.8 million people identified themselves in that way. This 276 percent increase in Americans who consider themselves multi-racial far outpaces the growth of any other racial-ethnic category during this period.

Those identifying themselves as Hispanic or Latino, for example, increased from 17.3 percent of the population in 2010 to 19.5 percent in 2020. Asian Americans increased from about 5 to 6 percent. But those who identify themselves as multi-racial—including Hispanics who do so—increased from 2.9 percent of the population in 2010 to 10.2 percent in 2020.

In its data, the census distinguishes between individuals who identify with just one race and those who identify with a race “in combination” with another. Importantly, the Census Bureau notes that “The ‘in combination’ multi-racial populations of all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category.” In other words, to the extent that any racial group grew, it was mainly because of its share in the growth of a multi-racial population.

This can be seen clearly in what is presented as the decline of the “white” population. In the 2020 census, those who marked themselves as just “white” decreased from 63 percent of the population to 57 percent, as compared to the 2010 census. However, while 57 percent of the population identified itself as “just white,” 71 percent of the population identified itself as either “just white” or “white and another race.” In other words, broad sections of white people were partnering with people from other racial and ethnic categories, creating a much larger section of the “white” population that identifies itself as multiracial.

If anything, these significant shifts point to the questionable, at best, scientific validity of the concept of “race” and its inability to provide a scientific basis for analyzing historical and social processes, let alone provide a progressive basis for the political struggles of working people.

In total, the US population grew by 23 million people since the 2010 census. The ranks of people who called themselves multi-racial grew by 24.8 million, suggesting that multi-racial couplings were a major factor on the overall population growth.

The census data is in line with a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center on intermarriage, which showed that of newlywed Hispanic people in the US, 39 percent, on average, do not marry someone who is Hispanic. For Asians born in the US, the figure is even higher, at 46 percent. The same study also gives a sense of how intermarriage is increasing: in 2015, 10 percent of the entire married population had an interracial relationship, but among newlyweds, it was almost double, at 17 percent.

What will America look like 30 years from now if this trend continues? Taking the 2010 to 2020 rate of growth of those identifying themselves as multi-racial and projecting it onto the future, about 156 million people would come from a mixed-race background by 2050. That would be about half of today’s population.

What if the general trend continued for 100 years, or 500? What meaning would race have when the broad mass of the population had ancestry from multiple countries and ethnicities from all over the world?

The racialist myth exploded

For several decades, but with increasing ferocity over the past decade or so, sections of the upper-middle class—especially in academia, the media, Democratic Party politics, and the arts—have sought to present the United States, and, for that matter, the world, as dominated by unbridgeable racial divides.

The pages of the New York Times and other outlets have increasingly devoted themselves to—as the Times ’ discredited 1619 Project puts it—convincing their readers that racism is in the “very DNA of this country” and its population. This wealthy stratum of the population has in many ways gone back to the original racialist conceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries, arguing as Stacey Abrams does in Foreign Affairs that there is an “intrinsic difference” between blacks, whites and other races.

But if racism runs in the DNA of the country and its population, why are such large and increasing sections of the population partnering, raising children and sharing finances with people who are supposedly insurmountably alien and hostile to them?

This dramatic growth—over just 10 years—is a simple and powerful refutation of the lie that America is composed of separate races of human beings who cannot genuinely understand each other, culturally relate or speak to one another, or politically unify—stuck, as it were, in entirely separate social trajectories.

But it is this very trend documented by the census that is either ignored or twisted by the leading purveyors of racialist thought.

A prime example is a column published this week by Charles Blow, the right-wing, racialist New York Times pundit. Blow presents the census data as a nightmare for “white power acolytes.” But nowhere in his column does Blow mention that the biggest growth revealed by the census was among mixed-race people, often people with one white parent.

Blow presents the data from the standpoint of a war between races—that is, the same premise as the white supremacists—but from the “black” side of the barricades. He writes that it heralds a race war, a “passage of power… not without strife” between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Such are the filthy lengths to which the racialist defenders of capitalism and enemies of the unity of the working class are prepared to go. Indeed, Blow is no less frightened by the increasing internationalization and homogenization of the population than the white supremacists and fascists.

Almost 175 years ago, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote: “The working men have no country… National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” ( The Communist Manifesto, Chapter two)

This is the process revealed in the census report. As the population becomes increasingly composed of urban workers, those workers are meeting, falling in love and having children with people from different national, ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds… increasingly dissolving the historical baggage of reactionary racial categories used for centuries to divide and rule over the oppressed.

Two other points are worth making about the census data.

First, while data released by the Census Bureau last January showed a significant slowdown in national population growth—37 out of 50 states grew more slowly than in the previous decade—the data just released shows that young people, in particular, are declining as a share of the population. During the last 10 years there was an absolute decline of 1 million people under the age of 18.

This shrinking youth population testifies to the economic hardship that millions of younger, would-be parents face post-2008. While the Great Recession is over 12 years in the past, the US economy remains, especially with COVID-19, in dire straits. The wealth of the ultra-rich has soared, but the vast majority of the population—regardless of ethnicity or skin color—has seen a further decline in living standards.

The report also notes that housing units grew by only 6.7 percent between 2010 and 2020, about half the growth of the previous decade. Again, this points to the slowdown in economic growth and the impoverishment of broad sections of the population, including the phenomenon of young people being forced to live with their parents through their twenties. The report also notes that almost 10 percent of the entire housing stock in the country lies vacant—some 13.6 million homes with no one living in them! This not only points to the financial inability of many people to find housing, but also the absurdity of the capitalist system, which squanders resources for the enrichment of an oligarchy and for war, while millions are homeless or without decent and affordable housing.

Billions in US federal rent assistance money withheld from millions facing eviction

Chase Lawrence

Out of the $46.5 billion in funding provided for rental assistance under two bailouts enacted in December 2020 and March 2021, the vast majority has not been distributed, with only an estimated $3 billion of the funds being distributed as of August 3 according to CNBC, while millions are at risk of eviction or foreclosure.

According to the Eviction Lab, in the six states and 31 cities tracked by it, 480, 456 evictions have taken place during the pandemic. In just those areas alone, 6,108 evictions were filed in the last week. This is in spite of the announcement on August 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the extension of the eviction moratorium to October 3 for counties “experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels.”

The moratorium extension itself was only issued after Democrats allowed it to expire on July 31 and then after they washed their hands of it. The latest temporary version is a significant revision of the previous moratorium which, at least in letter, covered all renters. While CNN, citing a “source familiar with the effort” estimates it covers 90 percent of renters, which by no means should be taken at face value, that would still mean hundreds of thousands are now not covered who previously were, and can be thrown out of their homes amid a surge in the pandemic.

The extension itself has an uncertain legal future as attested to by the federal judge who allowed the Biden administration’s revised moratorium to remain in place, no doubt a veiled reference to a challenge by the extreme-right Supreme Court.

Approximately 1.6 million households reported being “very likely” to face eviction in the next two months according to the US Census Bureau’s July 21-August 2 Household Pulse Survey, while another 1.9 million where “somewhat likely.” Some 5.8 million were not at all confident in their ability to pay next month’s rent. Additionally, 238,000 homeowners were “very likely” to have to leave their house due to foreclosure, while another 826,000 were “somewhat likely” to have to leave.

For those seeking assistance, only 287,000 cited applying and receiving household rental assistance through state or local government, while 1.49 million were waiting for a response and 890,773 were denied assistance.

Only 15 states and the District of Columbia had spent 10 percent or more of the funds initially approved by Congress as of the end of June, according to the US Treasury, despite $25 billion of the funds for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) having been approved on December 27 of last year and $21.55 billion in March 11 of this year, under the Consolidated Appropriations Act and the “ American Rescue Plan Act ” bailouts, respectively.

According to a HuffPost analysis of Treasury Department data, “in roughly 40 states, counties and cities, not a single cent from ERAP made it out the door during that time.” This included some smaller counties, but also whole states such as New York, which received $801 million in funds, and Puerto Rico at $325 million, where nothing from ERAP was distributed.

Chicago hadn’t distributed any of its $80 million in ERAP funds either at the end of June, with the spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Housing saying that the department had been waiting on the City Council, which is ruled by Democrats, failing to allocate the funds since May when the applications opened.

Politicians for both parties have criticized local governments for the glacial pace that rental assistance was distributed.

Senate Minority Leader and coup plotter Mitch McConnell stated last week, “The problem has been with state governments who have been pathetically slow to get the money out.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer criticized his own state of New York, stating he would send a letter to the state government to “immediately start disbursing those funds.”

Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, referring to the city of Chicago’s delay of $80 million in ERAP funds, stated that “Bureaucratic bungling is unacceptable,” and, “I am astounded and heartbroken that my constituents, who are suffering from horrendous economic woes in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, have not received the full financial relief that I voted for.”

New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio’s spokesperson Bill Neidhardt stated, referring to the unemployment benefits, “The main reason is that the application was fucking impossible.”

Neidhardt, saying perhaps more than he intended, stated, “I think it’s strategic incompetence. That’s why they delayed it, and that’s why they rolled out a mind-bogglingly unusable interface. Both those things show they didn’t want people to get the money.”

Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition stated that while some places were distributing funds, many states and local governments were “putting in place their own documentation requirements or very lengthy application processes, which are getting in their own way of distributing aid.”

State governments undoubtedly played a role in holding up these funds through sheer incompetence and indifference. The central reason, though, has the same roots as the holding up of unemployment money, and that is the drive to shove workers back into low-paying jobs through economic blackmail so they can get back to producing profits for the financial oligarchy. As the WSWS wrote on April 29 of last year:

The unemployment benefits program included in the CARES Act has been, to a large extent, an elaborate exercise in deliberate mass deception. When Congress and the White House presented the additional 13 weeks of state-based unemployment insurance beyond the typical 26 weeks, plus an additional $600 weekly federal supplement through July 31, 2020, as a social safety net during the COVID-19 crisis, they knew very well that millions of unemployed workers would be unable to take advantage of it.

The Democrats and Republicans knew that many workers would not be able to get through to the antiquated systems in the state capitals across the country, which would be completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the number of people seeking to apply for benefits. They were counting on these systems being so backed up with delays and confusion that workers would give up and end up receiving little or nothing of the government money.

Just as before, both Republicans and Democrats are well aware that the distribution of such money would encounter significant caveats, yet they did nothing to address these.

“In most cases they couldn’t scale up an already-existing program, or if they could scale up an existing program, that program was tiny compared to the funding available now,” Ann Oliva, a housing policy expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told HuffPost. “That explains some of the lag.”

The glacial rate of the distribution of ERAP funds is in direct contrast to the lightning fast speed at which the continuous bailout by the Fed to Wall Street and large corporations is carried out. The justifications, evasions and blame game going on in D.C. and across the states are thoroughly unconvincing given that the Fed gives out over $120 billion per month, almost triple the total amount allocated to ERAP , to buy up corporate bonds and other financial assets, which are quickly used by Wall Street to fuel an orgy of speculation whose result can be seen in soaring stocks and soaring wealth of the billionaires. This contrast becomes even more evident when it’s considered that only a fraction of ERAP funds have been distributed, while the $120 billion is quickly put to use in speculative activities by Wall Street.

One could also point to the bailout of the airline industry, which, while being nominally allocated less money, in reality received far more than the $3 billion currently distributed. American Airlines received $5.81 billion through the CARES Act, while Delta received $5.4 billion, with both of their CEOs receiving millions while laying off tens of thousands of workers.

The failure to provide for housing, and the ongoing eviction and foreclosure crisis, is a testament to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system and to the necessity for its overthrow and replacement by socialism, reorganizing society to meet human need rather than private profit.

US military steps up Taliban-approved evacuation from Kabul

Patrick Martin

US military evacuations from Kabul were stepped up Wednesday with the agreement of top Taliban leaders, who have arrived in the Afghan capital and begun establishing a new government to replace the US puppet regime that collapsed on Sunday.

Some 2,000 US citizens and Afghan associates were flown out of Kabul on Wednesday, and the US military said it would be able to increase the airlift to 9,000 a day once all runways at the main airport are cleared. There were at least 4,000 US troops at the airport and a total of 6,000 were expected once the full deployment was carried out.

Taliban fighters pose for photograph in Wazir Akbar Khan in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

General Frank McKenzie, head of the US Central Command, negotiated the evacuation protocol with senior Taliban leaders at Doha, Qatar, on Sunday, and he flew secretly into Kabul on Tuesday to oversee it, according to press reports. McKenzie did not give any interviews or have any publicized meetings with the Taliban during his visit.

The spectacle of the top US commander stealing into the airport with the permission of the victorious guerrilla movement against which he was fighting is a stark demonstration of the debacle suffered by American imperialism in Afghanistan.

No amount of vilification of the deposed Afghan government by the White House can conceal the fact that it is the US government, and the Biden administration, which have suffered a devastating defeat, not merely its puppet in Kabul.

Similarly, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley were asked at a Pentagon press conference Wednesday whether they planned to extend the military perimeter at the Kabul airport to establish evacuation routes for Americans who might be trapped in the city, they flatly acknowledged that they could not do so.

Not only did the American troops not have the “capability” to expand into the city, Milley said, but to attempt it might weaken their grip on the airport, the sole lifeline not only for those seeking evacuation, but for the American troops themselves.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby revealed that US commanders were speaking to Taliban commanders “multiple times a day” to avoid military conflicts between US and Taliban soldiers. The airlift is expected to continue to August 31, a date set by President Biden for completion, with as many as 9,000 people a day removed from the country.

However, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, parts of which were aired Wednesday evening, Biden for the first time indicated that the troop withdrawal deadline might be extended past August 31. “If there’s American citizens left [after August 31],” he said, “we’re going to stay until we get them all out.”

The top political leader of the Taliban, Abdul Gani Baradar, who had been heading the negotiations in Qatar, arrived in Afghanistan Tuesday for the first time in 10 years. He spent most of that period in jail or under house arrest in Pakistan, before he was released in 2018 at the urging of the Trump administration to take the leading role in talks with the United States.

In Washington, both Democratic and Republican congressmen and senators bemoaned the swift collapse in Afghanistan and attacked the Biden administration for its decision to pull out the last 2,500 US troops. The departure of the US forces became a trigger for the collapse of the puppet regime, which took only 11 days once the Taliban launched a military offensive.

In the ABC News interview partially aired on Wednesday, Biden told Stephanopoulos that he knew very well that there would be “no leaving without chaos ensuing” in Afghanistan.

This is a remarkable admission, and underscores that all the assurances given by a succession of US presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden himself—about “progress” in Afghanistan were a pack of lies.

All of these presidents, and a succession of Pentagon bosses, ambassadors and military commanders, were aware of the corrupt and unpopular character of the puppet regime in Kabul. All of them concealed this reality from the public, while portraying the US military intervention as a war against “terrorism” and for “democracy” and women’s rights.

The real nature of the puppet regime was summed up by columnist David von Drehle in the Washington Post, who observed, “You could fit all the genuine supporters of deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani into his getaway car and still have room for the piles of cash…” (Ghani reportedly escaped the country with $164 million, arriving Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates, where he will enjoy a luxurious exile).

The American media continues its near-unanimous hostility to the speech delivered by Biden on Monday, in which he defended his decision to withdraw. It continues its unrelenting pro-military propaganda, portraying the US occupation in Afghanistan as a defense of the Afghan people, after multiple revelations—including those by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange—of US war crimes against the population.

This campaign is aimed at preserving the essential ideological premise of imperialism and neo-colonialism—that the imperialist military is holding the line between “civilization” and savagery—for future use in other countries targeted by Washington, or even in Afghanistan itself, should conditions permit.

One report, by CNN Business, suggested the real material interests underpinning the 20-year US war. Headlined “The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs,” the article noted that while one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan was “sitting on mineral deposits worth nearly $1 trillion,” including not only iron, copper and gold, but also rare earth minerals and “perhaps most importantly, what could be one of the world’s biggest deposits of lithium—an essential but scarce component in rechargeable batteries and other technologies.”

Decades of civil war had prevented the exploitation of this potential wealth, but now, the article warned, China, which shares a border with Afghanistan and has maintained contact with the Taliban, was in a position to gain an advantage in the world market.

Even in defeat, American imperialism maintains its focus both on potential sources of profit and its wider struggle for global dominance. Biden emphasized this aspect of his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is his speech Monday, referring to “our true strategic competitors, China and Russia” as more important antagonists for his administration.

Mass COVID-19 deaths continue in Indonesia

Robert Campion

Indonesia persists as the epicentre of COVID-19 infections in Asia and, in terms of deaths, of the world.

There were 1,180 official deaths confirmed in Indonesia on Tuesday, taking the overall death toll past 120,000. The past 31 days has witnessed over 47,000 deaths and more than half of the total deaths from the pandemic have occurred in the last two months.

Workers in protective suits carry a coffin containing the body of a COVID-19 victim into an ambulance to be taken for a cremation in Bali, Indonesia, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

The number of daily cases has fallen from the July highs of 50,000 to 20,741, attributed to a drop in figures on the heavily populated islands of Java and Bali. The latter was devastated over the past month with hospitals overwhelmed and gravediggers unable to work fast enough to cope with the bodies.

On Tuesday, the island of Bali recorded 888 new infections as well as 48 deaths—the first time in three weeks that new cases fell below a thousand.

In the capital Jakarta, daily active cases per have dropped from 100,000 in mid-July to below 15,000 as of last week. New cases have dropped from 10,000 per day to 2,500. Bed occupancy for referral hospitals has likewise dropped to 33 percent and ICU occupancy to 59 percent.

Out of a population of roughly 10 million, a vaccination campaign in the devastated capital has resulted in 5,437,338 people fully vaccinated and 2,697,619 partially vaccinated as of Wednesday.

Even though 40 to 50 people continue to die each day, the fall in case numbers has led to authorities junking the “red zone” status of many in the city districts and declaring the disaster over.

Currently, the partial lockdown measures which began on July 3 are extended for another week. Shopping centres in 21 cities on Java are allowed a maximum capacity of 50 percent between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Chief investment minister Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, who has overseen the medical disaster, stated, “On one hand, it [the lifting of restrictions] indicates a rapid economic recovery but on the other hand it brings a serious risk of another surge in new cases in the next two or three weeks.”

Meanwhile, the virus continues to spread throughout the archipelago in Sumatra, Sulawesi, the southernmost province of East Nusa Tenggara and even the far-flung Riau islands.

As of August 6, new infections in areas outside Java and Bali accounted for 54 percent of the national total, up from 44 percent at the start of the month and 34 percent on July 25.

All of these provinces are dangerously behind Jakarta in terms of vaccination. The health infrastructure is ill-equipped to deal with major outbreaks, and lacks accurate reporting and contact tracing. Vaccination rates are approximately 15 percent in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. In East Nusa Tenggara, it stands at just 11 percent.

Poverty with multigenerational families living in cramped quarters, poor nutrition and lacking information exacerbates the dangers of contracting the disease, particularly for children. Since July, 100 children have died each week from the disease according to the Indonesian Paediatric Society (IDAI).

“People said that children are not affected and that children cannot die. But right now, we have a lot of children dying,” said Dr Aman Bhakti Pulungan, head of the IDAI in an interview to Reuters on Monday.

“Inequality is one of the problems. Inequality in treatment because not every place has a paediatric or neonatal intensive care unit.”

Dr Mario Nara spoke from Sikka, East Nusa Tenggara, which contains high rates of malnutrition and child mortality.

“Some are asthmatic… some are malnourished… others have heart problems, or other disabilities. They may have hydrocephalus [fluid in cavities of the brain], cerebral palsy and most of them are stunted,” he said.

“A condition like stunting or malnutrition will impact the child’s immune system. If they get an infection, it is likely to hit them harder.”

In an interview with the Financial Times, Fansca Titaheluw the acting director at Provita Hospital in Jayapura, the capital of Papua province in eastern Indonesia, reported three COVID-19 patients and a baby in intensive care had recently died due to oxygen shortages.

“If the outbreak caused by the Delta variant continues, and there is no change in attitude from the community, Jayapura will be in chaos,” he said.

On the island of Batam, Marlyan Marzzaman told the New York Times that when she was diagnosed with the disease in July her doctor told her to isolate at home. This led to the infection of her otherwise-healthy four-year-old Daniel, who developed a fever within days.

The hospital, having reached full capacity could not treat him in time. It lacked oxygen, ICUs for children and staff. The child died. “I am very, very disappointed,” Marlyan said. “When I asked for help there was no response. They really don’t value life.”

On Monday, President Joko Widodo emphasized in his State of the Nation address the need to always balance health and the economy, by means of avoiding a complete lockdown “[We must] find the best combination of interests between public health and economic interests because the virus is always changing and mutating. Thus, the handling must change according to the challenges faced,” he said.

Widodo also stressed the need to continue to implement the government’s pro-business “job creation” law passed last year amid mass protests by workers and labour groups. It constitutes an economic offensive against the social position of the working class with the slashing of real incomes, the removal of limits of the length of contract work as well as the scrapping of mandatory leave for childbirth, marriage or bereavement.

“The pandemic has indeed significantly slowed down our economic growth,” the president said. “But it must not hinder the process of structural reforms of our economy.”

Like governments around the world, Widodo’s administration is putting the corporate profits and the business interests of the wealthy before the health and lives of working people, with tragic consequences.