Death toll in Kabul airport terrorist attack rises to 170, as US military continues evacuations

Jordan Shilton

The official death toll from the terrorist attack outside Kabul international airport on Thursday was increased significantly on Friday to over 160. The number of Afghan victims almost tripled and the US Defense Department confirmed the death of one additional service member, bringing the total of American military fatalities to 13.

Wounded Afghans lie on a bed at a hospital after a deadly explosions outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Mohammad Asif Khan)

At a Defense Department press briefing Friday morning, Major General Hank Taylor stated that only one suicide bomber was involved in the assault. Originally, reports indicated that a second blast occurred at a nearby hotel. After the bomb exploded amid a large crowd waiting to be processed for travel at the airport’s Abbey Gate, other Islamic State-Khorazan (ISIS-K) attackers opened fire. American troops also fired into the crowd to clear the area. It remains unclear how many lives were lost as a result of the gunfire.

Taylor also stated that the evacuation of US and allied officials, operatives and citizens, as well as Afghan collaborators with the two-decade-long neocolonial occupation, was continuing. He said that 89 flights had left Kabul in the previous 24 hours carrying a total of some 12,500 people. Among them were 300 Americans, taking the total of Americans who have left since the Taliban came to power to over 5,100. Two flights carrying 18 wounded American soldiers left for the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Since evacuations began on August 14, some 111,000 people have been flown out. Taylor confirmed that another 5,400 people are inside the airport waiting to leave.

At a White House briefing later in the day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the Biden administration’s national security team believed that a further terrorist attack prior to the August 31 deadline for the end of the evacuation and withdrawal of US troops was “likely.” She added that “maximum force protection” measures were being taken at the airport.

It was made clear at both briefings that the numbers being evacuated over the coming days will drop sharply as US troops begin the process of withdrawal. Taylor declared, however, that it will be possible to evacuate people “until the very end.”

That remains to be seen, with a Taliban spokesman claiming late Friday that the organization had taken over control of parts of the airport. Although the Pentagon promptly denied the report, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, who is currently in Kabul, was informed by sources that American and British troops would hand over control of the airport to the Taliban in a matter of hours.

The extent to which Washington is dependent on coordinating and cooperating with the Taliban in the final stages of its withdrawal underscores the scale of the debacle suffered by US imperialism with the collapse of its puppet regime in Kabul. Even Biden administration officials were forced to acknowledge that the outcome of the remainder of the mission is to a considerable degree dependent on the Taliban’s support.

Asked whether coordination with the Taliban was the best of many bad options, or the only option, Psaki frankly responded, “Maybe both.” She added that “by necessity, that is our option,” because the Taliban controls “wide swathes” of Afghanistan and the area surrounding the airport. The coming days would be the “most dangerous period to date” in US military operation, she added in a prepared statement.

For its part, the Taliban appears to be offering an olive branch to Washington with its appeal, reported by the State Department yesterday, for the US to retain a diplomatic presence in Kabul after August 31. A Taliban spokesman also told al-Jazeera that the movement planned to announce an “inclusive caretaker government,” including members from the Uzbek and Tajik minorities.

Under questioning, Defense Department and State Department officials went out of their way to reject accusations of Taliban complicity in, or responsibility for, Thursday’s attack, the background to which remains murky.

ISIS-K claims to be a regional affiliate of Islamic State, and perpetrated a series of attacks that strengthened the US-backed puppet regime. Whatever the current affiliation of this organization, which reportedly has less than 2,000 followers in Afghanistan, it remains a fact that all of the Islamist militias, including Islamic State and the Taliban, are the product of the tragic encounter experienced by Afghanistan and the broader region with over four decades of US imperialist intrigue and brutal neocolonial war.

Underscoring the disastrous outcome of these policies for the imperialist strategists in Washington, even some of Biden’s fiercest critics have tacitly accepted that the US has no alternative but to withdraw. In a press conference convened Friday in response to the previous day’s terrorist attack, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced Biden for “weakness and incompetence,” and for accepting a “Taliban-dictated deadline.” But when it came to explaining his alternative course of action, all he could offer was a call for the reconvening of the House to receive a confidential intelligence briefing and adopt a bill that would prohibit US troops from withdrawing until “every single American” has been evacuated.

Retaining an American military presence in the war-ravaged country would require the deployment of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of troops. Biden and his foreign policy and national security advisers have ruled this out because they view such an expenditure of military and financial resources as a diversion from the main conflicts they confront, against Russia and above all China.

These geostrategic considerations are buried in the media coverage, which portrays the American and allied soldiers as saviors rushing to the rescue of the Afghan people to protect them from barbarism and death. American soldiers are “saving as many people as they can,” Taylor proclaimed at Friday’s Pentagon press briefing, and are engaged in a “noble mission.”

This militarist claptrap has been repeated ad nauseam by the media and political establishment in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. As Germany concluded its evacuation mission yesterday with the arrival of around 300 soldiers in the country, media outlets reported breathlessly about the returning heroes. The soldiers “brought thousands of people out of Afghanistan to safety,” wrote German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “Our country is proud of you.”

In reality, the American soldiers and their European allies are leaving behind a war-ravaged country in which hundreds of thousands of Afghans were slaughtered and maimed by air strikes, night raids, torture and abuse carried out by the imperialist powers and their local collaborators.

The Cost of War Project estimates that 700 civilians were killed by allied air strikes during 2019 alone, the highest figure since the war began. Although US air strikes declined in 2020 after the Trump administration signed a ceasefire with the Taliban, those conducted by the Afghan Air Force, which was entirely dependent on the US for ammunition and maintenance, increased. Some 3,000 civilians were estimated to have lost their lives in the conflict during 2020.

The pro-imperialist stooge regime that presided over these horrendous conditions was up to its eyeballs in graft and corruption. While former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled the country with over $150 million in cash, 90 percent of the Afghan population was living on less than $2 a day after two decades of US-led military occupation.

In a briefing released Friday that received far less attention than the fate of the comparative handful of people crowded around Kabul airport, the UN reported that up to half a million people could flee the country by the end of 2021 due to a looming food crisis. The UN reported that prior to the Taliban coming to power, half of the population required some form of humanitarian aid and half of all children under five years of age were acutely malnourished.

Since the beginning of 2021, 560,000 people have been registered as internally displaced, adding to the 2.9 million internally displaced persons at the end of 2020. Over 80 percent of those displaced since the beginning of the year are women and children.

Climate Crisis Putting a Billion Children at ‘Extremely High Risk’

Reynard Loki

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” Now the famed young eco-warrior and Nobel Peace Prize nominee might get her wish as she, along with other youth activists, has collaborated with UNICEF—a United Nations agency working in more than 190 countries and territories to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to the world’s most disadvantaged children and adolescents—to launch an alarming new report that has found that a billion children across the world are at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of climate change.

Released ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland, and on the third anniversary of Fridays for Future (FFF), the youth-led global climate strike movement founded by Thunberg, “The Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis” is the first climate report to combine high-resolution geographic maps detailing global environmental and climate impacts with maps that show regions where children are vulnerable due to an array of stressors, including poverty and lack of access to education, health care or clean water. The report introduces the new Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), a composite index that ranks nations based on children’s exposure to climate shocks, providing the first comprehensive look at how exactly children are affected by the climate crisis, offering a road map for policymakers seeking to prioritize action based on those who are most at risk. Nick Rees, a policy specialist at UNICEF focusing on climate change and economic analysis and one of the report’s authors, told the Guardian that “[i]t essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change.”

“For the first time, we have a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire. Climate and environmental shocks are undermining the complete spectrum of children’s rights, from access to clean air, food and safe water; to education, housing, freedom from exploitation, and even their right to survive. Virtually no child’s life will be unaffected,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director. “For three years, children have raised their voices around the world to demand action. UNICEF supports their calls for change with an unarguable message—the climate crisis is a child’s rights crisis.”

In addition to finding that approximately 1 billion children—nearly half the world’s child population—live in countries that are at an “extremely high risk” from climate impacts, the report found that almost every single child on the planet has been exposed to at least one climate or environmental stressor, such as air pollution, flooding, heat waves, tropical storms, flooding or drought. Moreover, the report found that 850 million children—approximately one-third of the world’s child population—are exposed to four or more stressors.

Specifically, the CCRI found that 1 billion children are “highly exposed” to “exceedingly high levels of air pollution,” 920 million to water scarcity, 820 million to heat waves, 815 million to lead pollution, 600 million to vector-borne diseases, 400 million to tropical storms, 330 million to riverine flooding, and 240 million to coastal flooding.

“Children bear the greatest burden of climate change. Not only are they more vulnerable than adults to the extreme weather, toxic hazards and diseases it causes, but the planet is becoming a more dangerous place to live,” write Thunberg and three other youth climate activists with FFF: Adriana Calderón from Mexico, Farzana Faruk Jhumu from Bangladesh and Eric Njuguna from Kenya, in the report’s foreword. “In 1989, virtually every country in the world agreed children have rights to a clean environment to live in, clean air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. Children also have rights to learn, relax and play. But with their lack of action on climate change, world leaders are failing this promise,” add the four youth activists, all part of the international youth-led Fridays for Future global climate strike movement. “Our futures are being destroyed, our rights violated, and our pleas ignored. Instead of going to school or living in a safe home, children are enduring famine, conflict and deadly diseases due to climate and environmental shocks. These shocks are propelling the world’s youngest, poorest and most vulnerable children further into poverty, making it harder for them to recover the next time a cyclone hits, or a wildfire sparks.”

“One of the reasons I’m a climate activist is because I was born into climate change like so many of us have been,” Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a youth campaigner from the Philippines who also helped launch the UNICEF report, told the Guardian. “I have such vivid memories of doing my homework by the candlelight as typhoons raged outside, wiping out the electricity, and growing up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom because I would wake up to a flooded room.”

In addition to detailing the climate risks facing the world’s children, the CCRI reveals a worrisome inequity regarding who must ultimately deal with the consequences of climate change. The 33 extremely high-risk countries for children—including the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau—collectively are responsible for a mere 9 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This finding supports related research published in a 2020 report produced by Oxfam that found that the richest 1 percent of people are responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions—twice as much as the poorest half of the global population. “Climate change is deeply inequitable. While no child is responsible for rising global temperatures, they will pay the highest costs. The children from countries least responsible will suffer most of all,” said Fore.

The UNICEF report’s authors connect this climate inequality to COVID-19, saying that the pandemic “has revealed the depth of what can go wrong if we do not listen to science and act rapidly in the face of a global crisis. It has laid bare the inequality that cuts across and within countries—the most vulnerable are often propelled further into poverty due to multiple risk factors, including poor access to vaccines, creating vicious cycles that are difficult to escape.”

In order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global net man-made emissions of carbon dioxide must be nearly halved by 2030, and reach “net zero” by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing the current state of the world’s climate science. The main problem is that the world’s nations are not meeting their targets to achieve these goals. In fact, a report released by the IPCC on August 9 found not only that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, but also that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming, with average global temperatures predicted to be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the IPCC’s discouraging findings a “code red for humanity.”

“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that,” Thunberg declared in an address to some 10,000 people gathered for a climate demonstration in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018. “There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today.”

In their report, UNICEF calls on governments and businesses to protect children from the climate crisis not only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also by increasing investments in health and hygiene services, education and clean water; providing children with climate education and green skills; including young people in climate negotiations and decision making; and ensuring a “green, low-carbon and inclusive” COVID-19 recovery “so that the capacity of future generations to address and respond to the climate crisis is not compromised.”

In December of 2011, during the COP17 UN climate talks held in Durban, South Africa, activists marched through the streets calling for action in the negotiations. Christiana Figueres, who was at the time the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (where she later oversaw the establishment of the Paris climate agreement in 2015), told the marchers that the children have a single message for climate negotiators: “Do more, do more, do more.” A decade later, with the Earth’s atmosphere heating up at a rate unprecedented in the last two millennia and economists suggesting that the Paris agreement may be doomed to fail, it’s becoming painfully clear that the UN—and the world’s political and business leaders—didn’t do nearly enough.

“There is still time for countries to commit to preventing the worst, including setting the appropriate carbon budgets to meet Paris targets, and ultimately taking the drastic action required to shift the economy away from fossil fuels,” write the UNICEF report youth activists Thunberg, Calderón, Jhumu and Njuguna, who committed to the climate fight, even if it means missing more days at school. “We will strike again and again until decision-makers change the course of humanity… We must acknowledge where we stand, treat climate change like the crisis it is and act with the urgency required to ensure today’s children inherit a liveable planet.”

Canada’s governments press ahead with school reopenings as fourth COVID-19 wave accelerates

Dylan Lubao

Schools across Canada are scheduled to reopen to full in-person learning over the next two weeks, even as the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic spikes, driven by the highly transmissible and deadlier Delta variant.

Covid-19 screening at Thorncliffe Park Public School (Twitter/@TPPS_TDSB)

Even before school doors open, COVID-19 infections have risen sharply in recent weeks. On Wednesday, Canada recorded over 3,300 new infections for the first time since the end of the third wave last May. Alberta alone recorded more than 1,000 new cases.

Craig Jenne, Canada Research Chair in infectious diseases at the University of Calgary, painted a bleak picture of the weeks and months ahead in an interview with CTV. “If you look back to last year’s cases,” said Jenne, “they really didn’t start rising sharply until we got into September with people back indoors at school. This year, the cases really have started to go up in a number of places—Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia in early August. Basically the wave has a month head start.”

Canada was ravaged by second and third pandemic waves that claimed the lives of more than 16,000 people and sickened more than 1 million others. Schools were major vectors of transmission in both the second wave, which peaked in late December 2020 and early January 2021, and the third, which peaked in late April and early May. “We can’t let this wave get out of control,” added Jenne, “because the more cases there are, the more hospitalizations, the more ICU [admissions] and tragically, the more deaths we will see this fall.”

Neither the federal Liberal nor the provincial governments have any intention of heeding this advice, or the mountain of evidence from other countries that shows the Delta variant is more dangerous for children. They are determined to fully reopen schools for in-class instruction, even while eliminating many of the inadequate “mitigation measures” they instituted last year, like cohort bubbles.

The school reopening drive is not being done for the sake of children, whose education governments have systematically undermined through decades of budget cuts. Rather, the capitalist politicians want to herd children into schools so that their parents can go to work generating profits for Canada’s banks and corporations.

With few exceptions, students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 will be expected to sit in classes numbering upwards of 30 children, many in rooms without proper ventilation and in some cases even windows. Virtually all provinces had announced they were scrapping mandatory masking in the classroom. But facing a public outcry, as cases have steadily mounted and public health officials have conceded Canada is in its fourth pandemic wave, several provinces, including Quebec, have had to reverse themselves at the last minute.

The growing opposition to these criminal policies among serious scientists was underscored by epidemiologist David Fisman’s decision earlier this week to resign from the Ontario Science Table, which advises the provincial government on pandemic policy. “I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the degree to which political considerations appear to be driving outputs from the tables,” wrote Fisman. “Or at least the degree to which these outputs are shared in a transparent manner with the public.”

Many provinces have eliminated any remote learning option, and even when such an option exists it is difficult to access and is truly viable only for a small minority of children, generally from more privileged families. In Ontario, for example, parents were required to notify their school district that they wanted their kids enrolled in online classes before the end of June, well before the dangers of the Delta variant became widely known.

Provincial governments have been shameless with their lies in justifying the reopening of schools. Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, who reports to United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Jason Kenney, derided remote learning and COVID-19 health measures as harming “the mental health of children and youth.” In reality, remote learning programs were carried out haphazardly across Canada and deliberately starved of resources, forcing teachers to cobble together virtual classes for students.

The escalation of the pandemic, along with the closure of schools, was principally due to the inaction of the Trudeau Liberal government at the outset. Only on March 10, 2020, as the pandemic was exploding across Canada, did it even write the provinces to inquire about potential shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other vital medical equipment and supplies. Subsequently, it and the provinces dismissed out of hand any attempts to eliminate the virus, insisting that the “economy” had to be reopened and that the population had to effectively learn to live with COVID-19.

The claim that Canada’s relatively high vaccination levels now constitutes a “ticket” out of the pandemic is a fantasy, not supported by science. Fully 5 million children in Canada remain unvaccinated, including all those under 12 years of age. At an online meeting this past Sunday hosted by the World Socialist Web Site, “For a Global Strategy to Stop the Pandemic and Save Lives,” Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a developmental biologist and researcher at the University of Calgary, demonstrated that abandoning lockdown measures and relying solely on vaccines to contain the pandemic will permit the Delta variant to spread exponentially.

By far the most notorious lie, however, as articulated by the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Government’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brent Roussin, is that “children are less likely to transmit COVID-19 while at home, in school or in community settings, and they are at lower risk of severe illness from COVID-19.” The preposterous character of this lie has been tragically confirmed by the recent explosion of the pandemic in the United States, which has been characterized by unprecedented child infections and hospitalizations as classes have begun to resume. In the week ending August 19, the US reported 180,000 cases in children, a 50 percent increase over the previous week. During the same period, 24 children succumbed to the disease.

According to Dr. Gasperowicz, research has shown that between 3 to 12 percent of children infected with the virus develop Long COVID. A chronic illness in which COVID-19 symptoms persist long after the initial infection, Long COVID can include respiratory problems as well as debilitating cognitive and developmental defects.

Provincial governments headed by establishment parties of all political stripes, from the ostensibly “left-wing” New Democratic Party in British Columbia to the hard-right Progressive Conservatives in Ontario, United Conservatives in Alberta, and Coalition Avenir Québec, are willfully ignoring the mountain of evidence that illustrates the madness of subjecting children, the most vulnerable section of society who deserve the most protection, to the best possible conditions for the spread of the virus.

Parents are increasingly worried about sending their children into classrooms that will function as breeding grounds for the virus. A July 2021 Statistics Canada report concluded that nearly 75 percent of parents were “extremely concerned” about juggling work, child care and their kids’ schooling during the pandemic.

An Ontario parent wrote a letter to the WSWS last week opposing the school reopening policy, in which he echoed the sentiments of countless parents and teachers who are looking for a means of opposing the ruling class policy of death and profits: “We need to find other parents, teachers and concerned workers and act. We need to demand that schools stay closed until all our children are vaccinated.”

The teachers’ unions continue to insist, against the wishes of rank-and-file educators, that schools be reopened with virtually no protections in place. From the start of the pandemic, the union bureaucrats have vehemently opposed rank-and-file demands for strikes over unsafe school conditions. They have mouthed token criticisms of government policy, and told teachers with COVID-19 concerns to file individual work-refusals with the various Labour Boards, whose function is to regulate and suppress the class struggle.

Sam Hammond, the president of the Canadian Teachers' Federation and former head of the Ontario elementary teachers' union (the ETFO), spoke for the union top brass across the country when he criticized the Ontario Tory government, not for pursuing its herd immunity policy, but for shuttering schools at the peak of the pandemic’s second and third waves. “Because of this government’s poor decision-making,” he railed, “students in Ontario lost more opportunities to learn in person than any other students in Canada. Educators want schools to stay open all year even as we combat the variants we know will threaten reopening and recovery for some time.”

Such a policy means accepting hundreds of thousands of infected children, tens of thousands of whom will contract Long COVID, and hundreds of child deaths.

Supreme Court orders Biden administration to revive Trump’s Remain in Mexico immigration policy

Kevin Martinez

The US Supreme Court ordered the Biden administration this week to reinstate the previous Trump policy known as the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) program, also known as the Remain in Mexico policy. The program had forced thousands of asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their court cases played out in the US.

A group of migrants rest on a gazebo at a park after they were expelled from the U.S. and pushed by Mexican authorities off an area where they had been staying, Saturday, March 20, 2021, in Reynosa, Mexico. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The vast majority of immigrants affected by this program were confined to squalid, makeshift camps along the US-Mexico border where they were prey to human smugglers and criminals, while their cases could drag on for months, if not years, in US courts.

The Remain in Mexico policy established in 2019 was one of many punitive measures by the Trump administration to deliberately discourage immigration to the US. It was suspended at the start of 2020, when Trump banned all migration into the US under Title 42, using the pandemic as a pretext to stop asylum seekers. This anti-immigrant program remains in effect under Biden.

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in rejecting the Biden administration’s attempt to stop a Texas-based judge’s ruling which ordered the government to revive the Remain in Mexico policy. Three of the six conservative judges were appointed by Trump while Republicans in Texas and Missouri had originally challenged Biden’s rescinding of the order as they sought to reinstate some of the worst anti-immigrant policies of the previous administration.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it would “vigorously challenge” the district court ruling but would comply “in good faith” and has started discussions with Mexico.

The court’s unsigned decision said the Biden administration violated federal law in reversing the policy, citing last year’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of University of California, when Trump tried to undo former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program which delayed deportation of young immigrants known as the “Dreamers” who entered the US illegally.

The court offered little explanation for its actions other than saying that the administration “failed to show a likelihood of success” on the claim that the memorandum rescinding the Migrant Protection Protocols was not “arbitrary and capricious.” The so-called “liberal” dissenting judges, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, did not write an opinion on their views of the case.

After Biden reversed the Remain in Mexico program this year, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit claiming the program’s suspension placed a burden on local governments to provide services for immigrants who were allowed to stay in the US. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted his approval of the Supreme Court’s decision, saying the policy “must be implemented now!”

A federal judge in Texas had previously ordered the administration to reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy. On August 19, the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, refused the White House’s request to put the ruling on hold.

Tuesday’s decision by the Supreme Court would mean that Kacsmaryk’s order must go into effect, but Justice Samuel Alito ordered a brief delay to let the court have time to consider the administration’s appeal. The Supreme Court may return to the issue if the Biden administration files an appeal.

The Supreme Court’s decision is another blow to the Biden administration’s attempt to present itself as a departure from the hardline anti-immigrant policies of Trump. While the number of immigrants seeking asylum has climbed in the last year, the current administration has refused to allow anything other than the most token numbers to enter the US.

Detention camps, for adults and children, still operate at full capacity despite the surge in the COVID-19 pandemic and the White House is planning to jail more immigrants. Regardless of which of the two capitalist parties is in power, the war on immigrants continues.

Terror bombs, gunfire kill at least 72 in Afghanistan capital

Patrick Martin

In what the US military described as a “complex attack,” several terrorists attacked a screening checkpoint at a gate into the Kabul airport and a nearby hotel on Thursday, inflicting a horrific toll of death and destruction.

Smoke rises from a deadly explosion outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)

Unnamed Afghan health officials told the media that at least 60 Afghan citizens were killed and another 140 wounded. The Pentagon said that 12 US Marines were killed and 15 wounded. Many of the wounded civilians and soldiers were in critical condition and the death toll could rise significantly.

At least two suicide bombers were believed to have detonated explosive-laden vests while awaiting or actually undergoing screening by US Marines at the Abbey Gate to the airport. Another suicide bomber, or perhaps a car bomb, exploded outside the Baron Hotel about 100 yards away. At the same time, gunmen opened fire on the crowd assembled outside the gate seeking to gain admittance to the airport and board evacuation flights.

US soldiers opened fire after the bombs were detonated, in order to clear the area in front of the gate. It was not clear whether any of the casualties were the result of that gunfire.

A group calling itself Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack. Allegedly a regional branch of ISIS, the group takes its title from the ancient name for the region of Central Asia of which Afghanistan is part.

The Taliban, which the Biden administration calls a “bitter enemy” of the Islamic State, denounced the attack. “The Islamic Emirate strongly condemns the bombing of civilians at Kabul airport, which took place in an area where US forces are responsible for security,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter.

A Taliban official told the Washington Post that the group has “launched an investigation to know the nature of the blasts and why it happened.”

The day before the attack, the US Embassy in Kabul, which has relocated to the airport, issued an official warning to Americans to stay away from the airport unless they had a scheduled flight to board, and calling on any US citizens near the airport gates to “leave immediately,” citing the imminent danger of a terrorist attack.

The 12 Marines were the first deaths among US troops in Afghanistan since February 2020, after the Trump administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in which the Islamic group agreed to halt attacks on US forces in return for a commitment that US troops would be withdrawn by May 1, 2021.

President Biden has repeatedly cited that agreement as compelling him to choose between completing the pullout or tearing up the deal and resuming a full-scale war in Afghanistan.

This pullout was largely completed by late July, with a formal handover of Bagram airbase and other US facilities to the Afghan government, but the regime collapsed in the face of a Taliban offensive that culminated in the fall of Kabul on August 15. US troops were then rushed back into the country, using the Kabul airport as a point of entry and as a collection point for evacuations.

The bloodbath at the airport caused political shock waves throughout official Washington. Only 15 minutes before Biden was to meet with Naftali Bennett, the new prime minister of Israel, the White House announced the meeting had been delayed until Friday, and a series of other meetings were canceled as top US national security officials dealt with the crisis.

Biden finally appeared before television cameras at 5 p.m. Washington time. He denounced the attack and said that evacuation flights would continue undeterred. Just over 100,000 people have left Afghanistan since the flights began August 14, and 7,000 more flew out of the airport on Thursday, he said.

Biden rejected calls from Republican congressmen that he drop the August 31 deadline for the removal of US troops, or that he send more troops to the airport and expand their scope of operations, either into Kabul or to seize Bagram airbase, the huge complex north of the capital city that was long the US military headquarters in Afghanistan.

He defended a policy of relying on the Taliban forces to provide security outside the US perimeter at the airfield, saying that there was no alternative, and that the Taliban and ISIS had a long history of conflict. He threatened military action against ISIS, declaring, “We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing.”

At an earlier press briefing, General Frank McKenzie, head of the US Central Command and in overall command of operations at the Kabul airport, said that terrorist attacks were expected in the remaining four days before all US forces are to be pulled out August 31.

He elaborated on the US military’s de facto alliance with the Taliban, saying US commanders were in regular contact with Islamic group, which was “actually providing the outer security of the airfield … and we will coordinate with them as they go forward.”

He said the face-to-face searches at the three gates to the airport were essential for the security of the airfield and especially of airplanes carrying out the evacuation flights. “You don’t want to let somebody on an airplane carrying a bomb, that could result in massive loss of life if an airplane were to get hit,” he explained.

Other dangers at the airport included rocket attacks, he said, noting that the US military forces “have pretty good protection against that, we have anti-rocket gun systems that have been out there, they are effective against—we feel we would be in good shape for that kind of attack to occur.”

Asked directly—by a reporter for the right-wing Wall Street Journal —whether the Taliban had allowed the bomber to go through to the US checkpoint, McKenzie replied flatly, “I don’t think there is anything to convince me that they let it happen.”

He also indicated that the evacuation flights would begin to include American troops as well and American and Afghan civilians, so that the August 31 withdrawal date would be met. The military planning was complex because it was “designed to maximize evacuees even as we begin to draw down the force on the ground. We recognize there is a need to balance the two.”

In a comment which underscored the precarious character of the US deployment at the airport, McKenzie said US military intelligence was focused on “any sign of something that might pose a threat to aircraft” because “aircraft is the only way we are going to get out of there.”

While the American media uncritically parrots the official claims that the attack was carried out by ISIS-K, the actual circumstances of the bombings are extremely murky. ISIS-K allegedly emerged in Afghanistan over the past few years as an avowed enemy of the Taliban, carrying out attacks that actually benefited the US-backed puppet government.

ISIS itself, initially a split-off from Al Qaeda, received assistance from US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to fight against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, before it came into conflict with the US military after crossing the Iraq-Syria border and threatening the US-installed regime in Baghdad.

All of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist and militia organizations have their origins in the US-backed guerrilla war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1987, directed against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. That is where Osama bin Laden formed Al Qaeda, and, after the Soviet pullout, where the Taliban originated, backed by US ally Pakistan.

Because of these deep-rooted connections and switching alliances, it is impossible to say definitely who are the actual perpetrators of Thursday’s bombing and who are their paymasters and masterminds. But the atrocity is one more contribution to the geyser of blood and suffering produced by American imperialism in an oppressed country torn by war and foreign intervention for more than 40 years.

Only Religious War Remains

James Haught

The Taliban seizure of Afghanistan underscores an ugly 21st century fact: Religion-based warfare remains the world’s worst type of armed conflict, and the “holy warriors” display barbaric cruelty.

After America’s CIA under President Reagan helped brutal Muslim tribal warlords drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, victorious warlords fell into conflict with each other. That’s when the Taliban, a movement of armed Islamic students, swept through the mountain nation.

The Puritanical Taliban, like most Muslim extremists, were notorious for their hatred of sex. They ordered all women to wear shroud-like burkas outdoors because “the face of a woman is a source of corruption” for men. Females couldn’t be educated beyond age eight, and before that could study only the Quran. Those who secretly attended underground schools were executed, along with their teachers. Girls’ schools were burned. Females weren’t allowed to work or go outdoors without a family male escort. They couldn’t wear high heels under their burkas because clicking heels might excite lustful men. Apartment windows were painted over. Wearing form-fitting clothes was a capital offense. Public stonings or other executions of women occurred. Eighty percent of brides were forced into marriage.

The Taliban allowed the al-Qaeda terror network to operate from Afghanistan in the 1990s. After the historic 9/11 attack of 2001, America invaded and drove out the fanatics. But two decades of costly American effort to create an Afghan democracy failed, and now the Taliban rule again. Most of the world is holding its breath, waiting to see if sexual savagery returns.

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Actually, the Taliban are merely one of many armed Islamist militias that rise and wage warfare. Some survive and some fade. There’s Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, Hamas in Palestinian territory, ISIS in Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, al-Qaeda hidden somewhere, Hezbollah spread internationally, and a dozen Muslim militias who have been fighting India’s Hindu army in Kashmir for 70 years.

Back in 2017, when the Taliban seemed rather dormant, a book by an Arabic scholar said: “Boko Haram is now the deadliest terrorist organization operational in the world, by virtue of the sheer number of people the group have killed.” The Sunni group is notorious for raiding villages and cities, massacring civilians (including Shi’ite Muslims), raping and abducting girls, and seizing boys to become soldiers.

I wonder if Boko Haram someday may seize Nigeria, as the Taliban did Afghanistan.

Most of these groups employ a tactic not available to other militaries – suicide bombing. Generally, only religious operations can find lone wolf volunteer “martyrs,” though desperate guerrilla fighters and others in the past have undertaken suicide missions as well.

Terror attacks may be committed by a larger force such as Boko Haram or al Qaeda, or by smaller groups such as the14 perpetrators who massacred the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris and the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon.

Around the globe, warfare has faded enormously in this 21st century. It’s ironic that the world might become war-free, if not for religion.

Denmark and the Case for Optimism on the Pandemic

Dean Baker

The explosion of coronavirus infections across the country, and especially in the low vaccination states in the South, is really bad news. While it appeared that the pandemic was coming under control and no longer posed a major health risk in early July, we are now seeing rates of infections of close to 150,000 a day.

The hardest hit states, like Louisiana and Mississippi are seeing daily infection numbers that far exceed the worst days of the winter. Intensive care units are filled to capacity, which not only prevents many people infected with Covid from receiving adequate care, but also victims of car crashes and others in need of immediate care. This is quite a turnaround from where we were a month and half ago.

But we can tell a better story about future prospects. We know that our vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant in preventing infections, but they still seem to be quite effective in preventing serious illness and death. This story is well-demonstrated by the situation in Denmark.

Denmark ranks near the top in the share of its population that is vaccinated. As of August 21, 75.4 percent of its population had received at least one shot and 69.0 percent were fully vaccinated. These numbers refer to percentages of its whole population, so the share of the population over 12 that has received at least one shot is close to 90 percent.

By comparison, the shares for the same day in the United States were 60.2 percent of the whole population receiving at least one shot and 51.0 percent being fully vaccinated. Getting another 15.2 percent of the currently eligible population vaccinated in the United States would mean giving the shots to over 42 million people.

We are current giving out more than 800,000 shots a day, most of which are mRNA vaccines which require two doses. If we assume this translates into roughly 450,000 new people getting shots each day, it would take us a bit over 90 days, or three months to hit Denmark’s vaccination rates. So, hitting Danish rates of vaccination should not be seen as impossible, although if the active resisters can successfully press their case, we may not be able to sustain the current rate of vaccination.

But we can still look to the situation in Denmark as a guidepost. The country actually still has a fairly high rate of infection. It has been averaging roughly 970 cases a day. Denmark’s population is just over 5.8 million, or 1.7 percent the size of the U.S. population. This means that Denmark’s current rate of infections would be equivalent to a bit less than 56,000 a day in the United States. That is less than half of our current rate, but close to three times the lows hit in July.

There is one important qualification to Denmark’s reported infection rate. They do an enormous amount of testing in Denmark. They have given an average of 13.7 tests per person since the pandemic began. By comparison, the United States has given just 1.7 tests per person. This means that the reported number of infections in Denmark is likely very close to the actual number. By comparison, the positive rate on tests in the United States is over 11 percent, which means that we are missing a large number of new infections.

So clearly Denmark has a far lower rate of infections than the United States, although it is still seeing a substantial spread of the pandemic. But the bigger difference between the United States and Denmark is not in the number of infections, but rather than number of deaths and seriously ill people. Denmark has been averaging just one death a day, which would be the equivalent of fewer than 60 a day in the United States. That compares to an average of more than 800 a day in the United States, a figure that has been rising. While every death is a tragedy, Denmark’s current death rate from Covid is considerably lower than what we would see from flu in a typical year.

Of course, many people who don’t die from Covid will suffer serious symptoms, some of which may be long lasting. We can’t know yet how many people who develop Covid will suffer severe or continuing symptoms, but rates of hospitalization should be a good proxy. Denmark currently has 20 people classified as being in serious or critical condition from Covid. That would be equivalent to roughly 1,400 people in the United States.

We currently have almost 23,000 people in intensive care due to Covid in the United States and of course these cases are disproportionately in the low vaccination states in the South. Denmark’s rate of Covid-related hospitalization would not be overwhelming hospitals and requiring health care workers to work themselves to the point of exhaustion.

In short, the situation with Covid in Denmark is not one where the disease has been eradicated. They are still seeing large numbers of infections. But it has become a very manageable disease, not one that most people need to fear and certainly not the sort of pandemic which would lead to large-scale economic shutdowns.

We should see this as an encouraging picture. If the nonsense coming from the vaccine resisters can be effectively countered, we should be able to reach vaccination rates comparable to Denmark’s in the not distant future. Some high vaccination states, such Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts, are not very far from reaching the vaccination rates seen in Denmark.

This means that bringing the pandemic back under control is still very much a reachable target. We just need to maintain a high rate of daily vaccinations and we will get there soon. And, ideally get people to wear masks and maintain social distancing in the areas where infection rates are still high, until we can substantially increase the vaccination rate in those places.

Covid may be with us for a while, but it need not be a dreaded disease and pose a major threat to the economy.

As classrooms reopen in Britain: Covid cases pass 6.5 million mark, with deaths over 100 a day

Robert Stevens

Just five weeks after the ending of Covid safety restrictions on July 19, Covid cases and deaths are rising sharply in Britain.

Public Health England data for the seven days to August 19 found that two thirds of England’s local authority areas saw a week-on-week rise in Covid infection rates. Of England’s 312 local authority areas, 210 (67 percent) saw a rise in infections. The new cases sent the total number infected with Covid past 6.5 million since the start of the pandemic—almost a tenth of the population.

Schools across the UK are set to return, with scientists warning this will result in a surge in cases and illness. Schools returned in Scotland last week, with evidence already emerging that they are fueling a surge in Covid cases.

On Wednesday, the UK recorded 149 Covid-19 deaths and a further 35,847 cases. This followed the 174 deaths reported Tuesday. More than 100 deaths a day on average are due to Covid. The 743 deaths recorded in the last seven days are an increase of 14 percent on the previous week. This week’s cases already stand at just short of 100,000. In the last seven days 236,796 new cases were recorded, up 14 percent on the previous week.

Total deaths stand officially at 132,003 according to the government’s manipulated figures. But when Covid is listed as a cause of death on death certificates the figure is now 155,000, an increase of more than 17 percent.

Hospitalisations are on the increase. On August 21, the last date for which data is available, 859 patients were admitted to hospital with Covid, taking the seven-day total to 6,172—up nearly 10 percent on the week prior. Nearly 1,000 people (942) are in hospital classified as in a serious/critical condition.

On Wednesday, Scotland recorded a record high of 5,021 new cases—the first time daily cases have passed 5,000. This topped the previous record of 4,323 hit 24 hours earlier, itself an increase on the record 4,234 daily cases reached earlier this summer. At a Covid briefing Tuesday, Scottish National Party First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has marched in lockstep with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in abandoning safety measures, declared, “New cases in Scotland have more than doubled over the past week, and that is one of the sharpest rises we have experienced at any point during the pandemic.”

She said of the grave situation resulting from the herd immunity agenda her government has overseen, “If this surge continues and accelerates and we start to see evidence of substantial increase in serious illness, we cannot completely rule out having to reimpose some restrictions.”

On Wednesday, SNP deputy first minister, John Swinney, was forced to acknowledged that the return to classrooms beginning the week of August 16 was a factor in the surge in cases. Of the new cases, the under-19s age group accounts for a third. School children are entirely unvaccinated, with just 42 percent of 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland having had their first dose of a vaccine. Swinney said, “Undoubtedly the gathering of people together in schools will have fueled that to some extent, and you can see that in the proportion of younger people who are testing positive.'

The overriding concern was still to keep parents working in factories and offices and the children in school, with Swinney insisting that school closures must be avoided “at all possible costs.” According to this agenda, Covid will be able to circulate unhindered in schools for two months, with the autumn half term break not scheduled until mid-October.

At the World Socialist Web Site hosted online discussion “For a Global Strategy to Stop the Pandemic and Save Lives!,” held Sunday, epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker described the herd immunity agenda of the Johnson government as an “almost barbaric experiment on the British people.”

The lifting of restrictions took place amid government and media lies that the threat of Covid was largely over, with much of the population vaccinated. Incessant propaganda was spread backing up claims that it was safe for people to meet up in crowded settings.

New data from a series of monitored large scale events, including concerts and sporting events, reveal that thousands of people were infected even among those who were double vaccinated. Some of the 37 “mass participation” events included the Wimbledon tennis tournament, Royal Ascot horseracing, the Download music festival and the Open Championship golf tournament. The largest of these was the British Grand Prix, held at Silverstone, Northamptonshire, from July 14-18 and attended by 350,000 people.

Fans fill the stands waiting for the start of the British Formula One Grand Prix, at the Silverstone circuit, in Silverstone, England, Sunday, July 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

As part of government’s Event Research Programme, 40,000 people attended the Latitude Festival, held in Henham Park in Suffolk, England from July 22 to July 25. To gain entry, people were required to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test or be double vaccinated. Data released by Suffolk County Council confirms that 1,051 people tested positive for Covid in the days after the event. Of these the majority (619 people) were infected while at the festival, with 432 found to be infectious when they entered the festival site, despite testing negative.

According to Public Health England, thousands of already infectious people attended the soccer Euro final at Wembley in London on July 11, eight days before lockdown restrictions were lifted. At least 2,300 people were “likely to be infectious” with the coronavirus on entering the stadium and 3,404 people at the game developed Covid-19 shortly afterwards, with PHE finding they were likely to have contracted the virus while attending the game.

The government gave the green light for mass participation events to go ahead based on lies. Since then, the Boardmasters music Festival held in the Newquay area of Cornwall from August 11 and 15 resulted in nearly 10 percent of the 50,000 people attending being infected with Covid.

According to local health officials, three-quarters of the infections were among those aged 16 to 21 and, given the wide geographical spread of those who attend festivals, most infections were spread across the country, while 800 of the new cases lived in Cornwall. The mass infections occurred despite those who attended being required to show a National Health Service Covid Pass as a condition of entry. Even more infections would have taken place had 450 people 'who would otherwise have been at risk of passing on the virus' decided not to attend or left the festival early. In the latest available figures from Public Health England, Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly have the second highest rate of Covid infection with 4,129 new cases recorded—a rate of 717.4 per 100,000 people.

An even more dangerous situation is posed in the weeks and months ahead, with research published Wednesday finding that protection against Covid infection after two vaccine doses falls within six months, with protection levels even projected to reduce to as low as 50 percent by winter.

Researchers at King's College London analysed PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test results from more than a million people who had been fully vaccinated. Those who had received two doses of Pfizer decreased from 88 percent protected at one month to 74 percent at five to six months. For those double jabbed with AstraZeneca, effectiveness dropped from 77 percent to 67 percent at four to five months.

Another study, published Tuesday, found that four in 10 people who have weakened immune systems show “low or undetectable” levels of Covid immunity after being double vaccinated. The OCTAVE study by the universities of Glasgow and Birmingham found that some of the people with weakened immune systems failed to generate any antibodies four weeks after receiving the second vaccination.