Why the World’s Eyes Are on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

Vijay Prashad

Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul. Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference.

Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government—Zabihullah Mujahid—tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but—given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan—it is unlikely.

Panjshir Exiles

On September 3, 2021, Afghanistan’s former Vice President Amrullah Saleh tweeted, “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.” A few days later, the Taliban took the Panjshir Valley, where Saleh had taken refuge for the past fortnight, and Saleh slipped across the border into Tajikistan. The resistance inside Afghanistan died down.

From 2001, Saleh had worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and then had become the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (2004-2010). He had previously worked closely with Ahmad Shah Massoud of the right-wing Jamiat-e Islami and of the Northern Alliance.

Saleh fled by helicopter to Tajikistan with Massoud’s son Ahmad. They were later joined in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe by Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party of Afghanistan. These men followed the lead of the Northern Alliance, which had taken refuge in Tajikistan’s Kulob region after the Taliban victory in 1996. The personal ties between Ahmad Shah Massoud and Tajikistan’s President Rahmon go back to the early 1990s. In March 2021, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar remembered that in the early 1990s Massoud told a group of Tajik fighters in Kabul, “I do not want the war in Afghanistan to be transferred to Tajikistan under the banner of Islam. It is enough that our country has been fraudulently destroyed. Go and make peace in your country.” That Massoud had backed the anti-government United Tajik Opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party, is conveniently forgotten.

After the Taliban took Kabul on August 15, 2021, and just before Saleh and Massoud escaped to Dushanbe, on September 2 Rahmon conferred upon the late Ahmad Shah Massoud the highest civilian award of Tajikistan, the Order of Ismoili Somoni. This, the protection afforded to the Saleh-led resistance movement, and Tajikistan’s refusal to recognize the Taliban government in Kabul sent a clear signal to the Taliban from Rahmon’s government.

Rahmon says that the main reason is that he is dismayed by the Taliban’s anti-Tajik stance. But this is not entirely the case. One in four Afghans are Tajiks, while half of Kabul claims Tajik ancestry. The economy minister—Qari Din Mohammad Hanif—is not only Tajik, but comes from the Badakhshan province that borders Tajikistan. The real reason is Rahmon’s concerns about regional destabilization.

Tajik Taliban

On September 11, 2021, Saidmukarram Abdulqodirzoda, the head of Tajikistan’s Islamic Council of Ulema, condemned the Taliban as being anti-Islamic in its treatment of women and in its promotion of terrorism. Abdulqodirzoda, the lead imam in Tajikistan, has led a decade-long process to purge “extremists” from the ranks of the mosque leaders. Many foreign-trained imams have been replaced (Abdulqodirzoda had been trained in Islamabad, Pakistan), and foreign funding of mosques has been closely monitored.

Abdulqodirzoda frequently talks about the bloody civil war that tore Tajikistan apart between 1992 and 1997. Between 1990, when the USSR began to collapse, and 1992, when the civil war began, a thousand mosques—more than one a day—opened across the country. Saudi Arabia’s money and influence rushed into the country, as did the influence of the right-wing Afghan leaders Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Rahmon—as chair of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan (1992-1994) and then as president (from 1994)—led the fight against the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), which was eventually crushed by 1997.

The ghost of the civil war reappeared in 2010, when Mullah Amriddin Tabarov, a commander in the IRP, founded Jamaat Ansarullah. In 1997, Tabarov fled to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), one of the fiercest of the extremist groups in that era. The IMU and Tabarov developed close ties with Al Qaeda, fleeing Afghanistan and Uzbekistan after the U.S. invasion of 2001 for Iraq, later Syria. Tabarov was caught by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani in July 2015 and killed.

As the Taliban began to make gains in Afghanistan late last year, a thousand Ansarullah fighters arrived from their sojourn with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. When Darwaz fell to the Taliban in November 2020, it was these Ansarullah fighters who took the lead.

Tajikistan’s Rahmon has made it clear that he fears a spillover of Ansarullah into his country, dragging it back into the war of the 1990s. The fear of that war has allowed Rahmon to remain in power, using every means to squash any democratic opening in Tajikistan.

Regional Balm

In mid-September, Dushanbe hosted the 21st meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Council of the Heads of State. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan had several talks with Rahmon about the situation in Afghanistan. As the war of words escalated, Khan called Rahmon on October 3 to ask that the tension be reduced. Russia and China have also called for restraint.

It is unlikely that guns will be fired across the border; neither Dushanbe nor Kabul would like to see that outcome. But both sides are using the tension for their own ends—for Rahmon, to ensure that the Taliban will keep Ansarullah in check, and for the Taliban, for Rahmon to recognize their government.

What Does India Get Out of Being Part of ‘The Quad’?

Prabir Purkayastha

The recent Quad leaders meeting in the White House on September 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue between four countries, the United States, India, Japan and Australia. Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear submarines.

Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order—unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries dated March 12, 2021, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security. Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises—the Malabar exercises—and have signed various military agreements. The September 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?

Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the UK signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines—the AUKUS agreement. Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the UK, and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.

The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation. The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the UK in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”

Earlier, President Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea. France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies—and yes, France still has colonies—and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific. France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories—read colonies—giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States. The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.

Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.

I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the UK or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations. The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, who have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers who believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.

Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners—Japan and Australia—are in the RCEP.

The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently. The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.

The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS. As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either. So when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.

The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones who would be allowed to a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others who would be denied these technologies. There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes. No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?

India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case than that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?

Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is retrofitting diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.

For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now—that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia. And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.

What price an Afghan life? Report lists hundreds of civilians killed by UK in Afghanistan

Jean Shaoul

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has paid compensation for the deaths of at least 289 Afghan civilians killed and 240 injured between 2006 to 2013 during the UK’s military operations.

This is the first official indication of the number of civilian deaths caused by British troops as the UK government has sought for years to systematically suppress the extent of casualties, including lying about the existence of its own documents and emails revealing official concerns about the killing of innocent Afghans.

The British government frequently reports that 457 British soldiers lost their lives and 616 soldiers suffered serious or very serious injuries but has failed to report Afghan casualties or to provide any estimate of the overall harm caused by British operations in its largest deployment since World War II. Yet the war has led to between 170,000 and a quarter of a million Afghans, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and millions forced from their homes.

British Army soldiers in Afghanistan [Photo: British Army]

The military intervention in Afghanistan, planned well in advance of the bombing of the twin towers in New York in 2001, was not launched to prosecute a “war on terrorism” but rather to project US military power into Central and South Asia. The US was intent on seizing control of a country rich in untapped mineral resources that bordered on the oil-rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin, as well as China, with the support and cover of its NATO allies.

Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair seized the opportunity to push himself forward as US President George W. Bush’s chief emissary for the “global war on terror”. In so doing, he sought to bolster Britain’s much-diminished global position while preventing Washington from pursuing a unilateralist course and the European Union from developing a policy that would leave Britain out in the cold.

Blair, like Bush, has never been held to account for his role in ordering the invasion of Afghanistan and later that of Iraq, which gave rise to unspeakable crimes, including torture, “extraordinary rendition”, the indefinite military detention of US-proclaimed “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay and the cold-blooded murders of civilians.

With the typical duplicity, UK junior Armed Forces Minister James Heappey claimed that the cost of Operation Herrick was £22.2 billion, omitting to say that this operation, which officially ended in 2015, covers only part of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Frank Ledwidge, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, who wrote Investment in Blood in 2013, believes that this will have risen to a staggering £38-£39 billion now, without considering the ongoing costs of caring for wounded veterans.

According to Boston University’s Cost of War project, around 47,245 Afghan civilians suffered violent deaths as a direct result of the conflict between 2001-2019. The UK-based charity Airwars estimated, using United Nations and the Nation data, that a minimum of 4,815 civilian deaths were the direct result of US airstrikes.

In the case of Britain, the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), which analysed nearly 7,000 compensation claims paid out by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), found that of the 289 pay outs, 84 were for children, and at least 43 were for females. The MoD only made the compensation claims available in response to numerous Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

AOAV has a well-founded belief that this number of civilian deaths linked to British military operations in Helmand province is likely to be an underestimate of the real numbers, given the difficulty Afghan citizens would have had in applying for military compensation. Records show that the MoD rejected most compensation claims submitted by the families, denying responsibility for 885 claims of death and 285 claims of injury.

Overall, the British military paid out a miserly £688,000 for 289 deaths, an average compensation of £2,380. Even this inflates the value placed on an Afghan life, as some of these pay outs were combined with injuries and property damage.

One family received £586.42 for the death of their ten-year-old son in December 2009 and another just £104.17 for a confirmed fatality and property damage in February 2008, less than others received for a damaged crane (£873), for the death of six donkeys “when they wandered on to the rifle range” (£662), for “Warthog damage” in Nahr-e-Saraj, Helmand (£240) and less than the £110 for a lost mobile phone in Camp Bastion.

The sums paid were far lower than for claims in Cyprus and other European countries. AOAV stated that Britain paid out 36 percent more in the two decades of the War on Terror to claims originating in Cyprus (£8.44 million) than in Afghanistan (£6.18 million). The MoD paid out more in Cyprus (£1.04 million), where most claims were for crop or livestock damage, or in Europe (£1.17 million), mostly for traffic accidents, than for the 289 civilian deaths in Afghanistan (£688,000).

The MoD also recorded payments to operations involving the elite Special Air Service (SAS), which has been accused of involvement in the execution of civilians, including paying £3,634 to the family of three Afghan farmers allegedly killed in cold blood in 2012 within three weeks of the incident. This unusually prompt payment was recorded as an “assistance payment to be made to calm local atmopherics [sic].”

AOAV say that based on documents they obtained from the MoD under an FoI, 17 British military personnel have been charged in relation to civilian casualties and 15 prosecuted in relation to the 529 deaths and injuries for whom the MoD paid compensation.

What happened to Sergeant Alexander Blackman is illustrative of British imperialism’s attitudes to such crimes.

In 2011, Blackman was filmed by a fellow soldier shooting a man, already seriously injured by gunfire from an Apache helicopter, in the chest at close range with a 9mm pistol. After he shot the prisoner, Blackman was captured on camera stating, “There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.” He turned to those watching and stated, “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention.”

The Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of captured and wounded prisoners of war requires that those who have laid down their arms or who cannot fight due to sickness, wounds or detention should be “treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”

In 2013, Blackman was found guilty of murder by a military court and sentenced to 10 years in prison, reduced on appeal to eight years. In 2017, five senior judges at London’s Court Martial Appeal Court downgraded the original finding from murder to manslaughter, accepting a plea of diminished responsibility and allowing him to be released from prison after serving just three and a half years.

The government has introduced legislation that will put a five-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. With its “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians, the law will free the military from all constraints.

It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of the imperialist powers, but crucially those at the very top of the political and military ladder who planned and executed this criminal war, that have escaped punishment.

Instead, the only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported the crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who—after first being arrested in London over in 2010—is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison awaiting a US appeal to the Supreme Court for his extradition to the US where he faces 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act.

After the German elections: Mass layoffs and plant closures begin

Ulrich Rippert

On the advice of the trade unions and establishment political parties, many companies had postponed their announcements of rationalization measures, mass layoffs and plant closures until after the election.

The aim was to prevent further workers’ protests during the election campaign and on election day, in addition to the strike by train drivers, the protests by Siemens Energy workers in Berlin against massive job cuts at the gas turbine plant, and the strike by workers at Berlin’s two largest hospital groups.

But as soon as the polling stations were closed, there was a hail of bad news from factories and corporate headquarters.

Opel Eisenach

Company management suddenly announced short-time working until the end of the year, which means massive wage losses for employees. There are also clear indications that the production stop will be used to prepare the closure of the plant in close collaboration with the works council and IG Metall union.

Opel plant in Eisenach (Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

Ford Saarlouis and Cologne

On the sidelines of the Automotive Congress in Saarbrücken last week, Ford workers again demonstrated against the massive job cuts at the Saarlouis plant. The future of the historic plant, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with great pomp, is completely uncertain. In his provocatively arrogant manner, Ford Germany boss Gunnar Herrmann told the Saarbrücker Zeitung that if there was any future at all for the plant, it would only be if all employees brought “gigantic flexibility with them” in the future. “Gigantic flexibility” is apparently the new term for the slave-like exploitation of labour.

In Cologne, Ford has stopped Fiesta production until the end of October because of the shortage of materials. What will happen to the plants after the crisis is still completely unclear. Last week, the group’s management suddenly announced that it would focus its transition to electric mobility heavily on the US and build new plants in the states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

VW Wolfsburg

“Gigantic flexibility” is also to be introduced at VW. Company management announced a “radical restructuring” to “compete against Tesla and the competition from China.”

Last Thursday, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and brand boss Ralf Brandstätter called all 120 top managers together in Wolfsburg for a crisis meeting. They said there had to be “a revolution” at the main plant, similar to “open-heart surgery.” The VW bosses stressed: Without a massive increase in productivity and profitability, the group would not be able to hold its own in the international market.

Tesla, but also the many new Chinese manufacturers, produce more cheaply and faster. At the same time, the quality of their vehicles is improving all the time and has now reached European standards. As a result, more than 70 percent of Chinese customers have already decided to buy their next premium vehicle from a Chinese manufacturer, according to automotive experts from the consulting firm Kearney. In addition, a Tesla 3 is built in ten hours, more than three times as fast as a VW ID.3 in Zwickau. This puts Tesla in a different dimension in terms of productivity and profitability.

Bolta-Werke

Bavarian automotive supplier Bolta Werke from the Nuremberg region has filed for bankruptcy. Bolta says it has around 1,000 employees at its Diepersdorf headquarters. In terms of the number of employees, it is one of the largest companies in the Nuremberg region. The company has subsidiaries in the south of the USA and in Mexico. Worldwide, 2,400 people work for the Bolta Group.

FAM

The long-established machine and plant manufacturer FAM is cutting 100 of the total of almost 600 jobs at its Magdeburg site. According to the report, employees were informed of details of the job cuts at a works meeting last Wednesday. To prevent protests, the works council and IG Metall immediately announced there would be a transfer company and severance pay for those affected.

Blohm+Voss

The long-established Hamburg shipyard Blohm+Voss is facing mass layoffs. At a staff meeting last Friday, the management of the parent company Lürssen, from Bremen, announced that a large part of the workforce will have to leave. Currently, the shipyard has about 580 employees. The union announced it would hold negotiations.

Evonic

The Essen-based Dax-listed group made a surprise announcement a week ago that the Niederkassel-Lülsdorf site, in the Rhine-Sieg district of North Rhine-Westphalia, is to be abandoned in the foreseeable future. The aim is to sell the entire Niederkassel site to a new owner. The future of the 600 employees is completely uncertain.

This list could go on and on, and it grows longer every day.

After the elections, the ruling class is implementing a general attack on workers. The hundreds of billions of euros that flowed primarily into the large companies and banks in the course of the so-called coronavirus rescue packages are now being recovered. At the same time, the German economy is to be made more profitable in the face of international competition. All this requires massive attacks on wages, working conditions and jobs. In the auto industry alone, half a million jobs are at stake.

Workers who take up the fight to defend jobs, and against social cuts and wage reductions, are confronted not only with all the parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament), but also with the unions and works councils, which form a close pact with management and corporate executives. They act as co-managers and develop concepts for the corporations and government to assert the interests of German industry in the global competition for markets and profits.

In doing so, they use their extensive apparatus of functionaries, including works council representatives and shop stewards, to suppress a real struggle to defend jobs, wages and social standards. This strategy also includes pseudo-protests that serve only to spread frustration and site-specific campaigns that divide and pit workers against each other. But the unions are increasingly failing to control and suppress the growing resistance in the workplaces.

Study finds that developing countries have paid a catastrophic price during the COVID pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

This week, a new multinational study was released in preprint form investigating the burden of COVID-19 in developing countries. As the authors noted, the lack of appreciable detailed systematic data at national and subnational levels in low-income countries has made estimating the impact of COVID-19 in these regions complex.

The generally low reported deaths from COVID-19 in low-income countries has given the appearance that these regions, because of the population’s overall younger age, as some have observed, have skirted the pandemic’s impact compared to high-income countries. However, the true toll may be hidden due to underreporting. It remains a pressing issue, as a global response to the pandemic requires an accurate assessment of the devastation wrought by the pandemic in every part of the world.

The World Health Organization has assessed that the deaths from COVID-19 at the end of 2020 were at least three million instead of the officially reported 1.8 million. They wrote, “COVID-19 deaths are a key indicator to track the evolution of the pandemic. However, many countries still lack functioning civil registration and vital statistics systems with the capacity to provide accurate, complete, and timely data on births, deaths, and causes of deaths.”

The Economist’s analysis of excess deaths recently placed the burden of the pandemic at over 15 million deaths, even though reported COVID deaths were less than five million at that time. Many low-income nations had excess deaths many times as high as their official figures for COVID deaths, though they also acknowledged the uncertainty of these estimates due to inadequate data.

Even the model of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, one of the more conservative, places the current “excess COVID-19 deaths” at 12.35 million globally. In contrast, their current projections for reported COVID-19 deaths stand at 5.2 million, a vast undercounting indeed.

The latest study also acknowledges that substantial undercounts in developing countries may be contributing to these discrepancies. A study from Zambia noted that only ten percent of those who died from COVID with a documented positive PCR test had their deaths appropriately registered. The epidemiological investigation found that COVID may have caused up to 87 percent of all deaths in the country in mid-2021.

Similarly, the cumulative COVID deaths as of September 2021 in India are reported at 450,000. However, a study posted in preprint form in July 2021, estimating excess deaths through a review of civil registration system data, facility-based death reporting systems, and national-level surveys, found that more than three million lives had been lost to COVID or seven to eight times higher than reported.

Accordingly, the authors sought to determine the overall prevalence of COVID-19 infection in developing nations, establish the relationship between seroprevalence in relation to age, and then establish Infection Fatality Rates (the proportion of deaths among all those infected, including both detected and undetected cases) by age for these countries. Finally, they attempted to compare the IFR to those from high-income countries.

The rationale for using IFR is that many infected people are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms and remain undetected. While proportion of deaths to diagnosed cases, or Case Fatality Rate, is easier to determine, IFR provides a more accurate assessment of the burden of the disease in the population.

As previously mentioned, the relationship between age and COVID-19 mortality is a critical factor to investigate. In many developing countries, the population’s median age is much lower than in high-income regions, leading many to conjecture that these countries are indubitably protected. The authors wrote, “Several recent studies have assessed the severity of COVID-19 in high-income countries with advanced healthcare systems, and several have documented a strong relationship between IFR and age. Indeed, one study found that differences in the age composition of the population and the age-specific prevalence of COVID-19 accounted for nearly 90 percent of the variation in population IFR across locations.”

Their findings have refuted previously held views that such regions were spared the pandemic’s devastation and provide the necessary context for the discrepancies between reported COVID deaths and excess deaths as documented in the cited sources.

The IFR was estimated on the basis of seroprevalence , the presence of antibodies to coronavirus in the blood serum of those tested . This measure of the level of infection in the population was considerably higher across developing countries after a single wave of infections compared to high-income countries. The authors write, “Where the majority of high-income locations have seroprevalence below 20 percent…a large number of developing countries have seroprevalence far exceeding this rate.” This means that in the course of a surge of infections, a large swath of the population became infected.

Figure 1 Age-Specific Seroprevalence by Location

A significant finding of theirs noted that seroprevalence across age groups in developing countries was essentially the same, which meant that young people were as likely to become infected as the elderly.

The abject poverty across many of these developing regions, including Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, is crippling. Many families are forced to live together in cramped dwellings. Those fortunate enough to find employment work in demanding manual labor in proximity to other workers, which gives the virus ample room to spread deep into communities. In such instances, the idea that the elderly populations can be insulated is preposterous.

Regarding estimates of regional IFR for a developing country’s population compared to high-income countries, these were more heterogeneous. Five regions were below the estimates for high-income countries, and four were equal. Broken down to smaller locations, sixteen were higher, of which eight areas had IFR double that of high-income estimates. Such differences may seem perplexing, but more on this later.

When the IFR between high and low-income countries was stratified by age, the real burden of the pandemic on developing countries became clearer. For instance, even though the virus rarely kills young people, the age-specific fatalities in developing countries compared to high-income countries for those under 25 were 2.3 times higher. In other words, someone of the same age in a developing country had more than double the risk of dying from COVID than his counterpart in a country with significantly more resources.

Figure 2 Table showing Comparison of the ratio of IFR between Low and High income areas by age

As the age groups rose, the differences in fatality ratios narrowed but never converged. For instance, those between 40 and 50 years had an IFR nearly twice those at the same age in high-income nations. Between 60 and 70, the IFR was 1.5 times higher in developing countries.

These discrepancies in fatality ratio underscore the significant impact socioeconomic factors have on any country. Early in the pandemic, it quickly became known that early medical intervention saved lives. Access to hospitals, high concentration oxygen, intensive care units, and variety of pharmaceuticals are indispensable to someone’s chances of surviving COVID-19.

The massive waves that struck diverse regions such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, Africa, and India demonstrated how quickly a developing country’s health sector became inundated. Scenes of families waiting in line with empty canisters of oxygen juxtaposed with mass graves and funeral pyres on fire were replete in the press. The graph of excess deaths from Poland and South Africa below captures the true hidden magnitude of devastation when these surges swept through the country.

Figure 3 Daily Excess Deaths (Red Line) vs COVID reported deaths (Grey shade) across Poland and South Africa.

Regarding the discrepancies in IFR by various regions, the authors compared these estimates with the percent of well-certified death registrations. As the figure below demonstrates, countries that more accurately documented the cause of death generally had a higher population IFR. In contrast, countries like India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, and Ethiopia, with low population IFR, were deficient in certifying deaths properly.

The authors wrote, “In general, the most likely explanation for large differences in reported IFR appears to simply be the recording of deaths in each region. While other factors such as GDP are correlated with death rates, they are also highly correlated with death reporting, and a likely explanation appears to be that the majority of places with very low IFRs are simply those places that cannot capture COVID-19 deaths adequately.”

In other words, poor countries did not escape the impact of the pandemic, they simply lacked the reporting capacity to document this impact systematically.

Figure 4 Population IFR and well-certified death registrations

The study underscores first and foremost the global character of the pandemic. No region has been spared the devastation caused by the capitalist policies that have allowed the virus to move freely so as not to impede the insatiable drive for profits. It also has glaringly exposed the tremendous inequity in access to resources that have produced such social misery.

Though global GDP fell by 3.3 percent in 2020, the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by nearly $4 trillion in the same period.

The economic loss, in real terms, means the equivalent of 255 million jobs were erased across the globe, but particularly in Latin America, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia. The IMF predicts that 95 million more people have fallen into extreme poverty, with an additional 207 million by 2030 as a byproduct of the severe long-term impact of the pandemic.

Not only are more people becoming infected in the poorer countries than in high income countries, because of the inability to carry out social distancing, masking and other mitigation measures, the mortality rate associated with COVID infections is higher, for lack of health care infrastructure. Weak reporting systems mean that there is a vast burden of death hidden from the eyes of the world.

Only an international strategy based on a socialist revolutionary perspective can address these massive and harrowing disparities.

The ruling elites are not only refusing to use the resources needed to combat COVID-19 because it would lower their profits. They see the pandemic as a welcome “natural catastrophe” that will rid the planet of what they deem to be unproductive people who are only a drain on their ability to extract more surplus value. This is the other unspoken and criminal aspect of their policy towards the coronavirus.

UK’s petrol crisis highlights collapse of European road freight industry

Thomas Scripps

For the last week and a half, British petrol stations have been gridlocked by drivers seeking scarce supplies of fuel.

Petrol stations normally operate with their storage tank at 40 percent capacity and rely on “just in time” deliveries to replenish stocks. Two weeks ago, the ongoing shortages of HGV and fuel tanker drivers disrupted supply chains, leading to panic buying.

Between September 22 and 29, there was a 190 percent increase in the number of people driving to petrol stations, peaking at over 400 percent on September 25. Each customer bought 22 percent more fuel on average than normal.

At the height of the crisis on the weekend of September 25-26, average fuel capacity at petrol stations fell to 16.6 percent, with 50 to 90 percent running completely dry in different areas of the country. On September 28, national traffic fell to 86 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Healthcare staff and other key workers warned they would be unable to get to work.

A sign reading "We Have No fuel, waiting on delivery" at a fuel station in sourthern England (WSWS Media)

Although stocks have begun to increase again, one fifth of stations in London and the South East are still without fuel, and 18 percent had only one grade available. In the rest of the country, 8 percent are empty and a further 6 percent have only one grade.

Shortages have contributed to a sharp rise in the price of fuel, with petrol at an eight-year high and closing in on a record. This has also been driven by a global increase in the cost of oil, up ten percent over September and is expected to climb further.

After first ignoring the problem for days, the government announced on September 25 that it would launch a temporary visa scheme asking 5,000 lorry drivers to come from Europe to work in the UK delivering fuel and food from the end of this month—until Christmas Eve when they would be thrown out again.

Popular uproar forced the extension of this scheme to the end of February. But whereas the government is seeking to recruit around 300 drivers immediately, the Times and the Department for Business report that so far just 27 have applied. Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims the number is 127.

On September 30, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab suggested using low-level offenders to plug the HGV shortage.

On October 4, the army was deployed to much fanfare to help with fuel supplies. Two hundred soldiers were made available, but only half have the skills necessary to drive tankers.

The fuel crisis has sparked a wave of well-deserved outrage against the government and its catastrophic Brexit policy. But the events of the last two weeks point to a broader crisis of the European economy.

According to think tank Transport Intelligence, the UK’s shortage of roughly 76,000 lorry drivers (elsewhere estimated at 100,000) is part of a general shortage of some 400,000 drivers across Europe. Poland is the worst affected, with a shortage of 124,000, 37 percent of positions, though this is most likely the result of Polish drivers working in more prosperous European Union countries. In Germany, 45,000-60,000 are missing; in France, 43,000; in Spain and Italy, 15,000; in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, between 2,500 and 5,000.

Shortages have been affecting the road freight sector for 15 years and have been aggravated by the pandemic and the recent reopening of the economy driving up demand. This pan-European breakdown in such a vital economic sector is the result of decades of private profiteering and deregulation which have eroded logistics workers’ pay and conditions.

There are over half a million people with HGV licenses in the UK, but well over 200,000 of them are choosing not to take up vacancies. A survey of over 600 industry figures in the UK by the Road Haulage Association found that retirement, changing working rules, the pandemic, low pay, (not to mention appalling working conditions) and drivers leaving the industry were some of the main reasons for the lack of workers.

The average age of a UK lorry driver has climbed to 55—less than 1 percent are younger than 25. From 7,500 retirements a year in 2010, the sector went to 10,000 a year in 2020, or 4 percent of the workforce. The total number of people employed as drivers fell 7 percent between 2019 and 2020.

The same process has been at work in Europe. Politico reported EU advocacy director at the International Road Transport Organisation, Raluca Marian warning that it was “easy to calculate an apocalyptic scenario” for the EU, based on events in the UK. In Europe, the average age of a driver is 44.

The crisis is more acute in Britain in part because of Brexit. Somewhere between 10,000-20,000 EU drivers left the UK after it withdrew from the union. Brexit-related delays at ports and disruption to import-export routes have also played a role, exacerbating the longstanding export imbalance between the UK and Europe which requires many lorries to return from Britain empty and making the routes relatively less desirable for businesses.

But the dominant factor is the UK’s more rapid destruction of workers’ protections and wholesale embrace of the free market since the Thatcher government came to power in 1979. UK hauliers have so thoroughly gutted the conditions of their workers, including by hyper-exploiting cheap, predominantly Eastern, European labour, that UK-based workers have left the industry in droves.

Over 55,000 domestic drivers left the industry in just the last 18 months. The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the especially appalling conditions these workers have confronted throughout the pandemic, and on strike action organised by rank-and-file drivers this August. Richard Simpson, former editor of Trucking Magazine, wrote in the Guardian, “Why would they want to return to the job? Facilities are poor, the hours brutal and the responsibilities onerous. And these are only going to get worse.”

Fundamentally the same causes lie behind shortages of agricultural workers, abattoir workers, construction workers, care home staff and nurses, among others. Basic socio-economic infrastructure has been run down under the rule of a super-rich oligarchy whose only concern is the debt and speculation fueled expansion of their stock market portfolios, with scant regard paid to the maintenance of even the most basic industries and social infrastructure, let alone the development of a skilled and adequately paid workforce.

Even senior Tory politicians have, anonymously, blamed the current crisis on “a failure of the free market” and accused UK businesses of being “drunk on cheap labour”, according to the Telegraph .

The deployment of the armed forces to an increasing range of basic social tasks—5,000 to aid with testing, vaccination and medical care during the pandemic, and now roughly a hundred each to help the Scottish ambulance service and the fuel tanker sector—is the most striking confirmation of British capitalism’s ongoing collapse.

Not only can the free market not provide the necessary workers, but the state also has no resources to mobilise except its armed forces, and even these can barely muster a few hundred people with the required skills.

No amount of social hardship will prompt the oligarchs or their representatives to change course, whether under Johnson or the far-distant prospect of a Labour government. Their solution is the stepped-up exploitation of the working class and a reflexive turn towards authoritarian measures. The use of the army will inevitably lead to demands for stepped up recruitment to plug gaping holes in the economy. But these forces will then be employed to break workers’ resistance to poverty wages and sweatshop conditions.

For the working class, the only way out of this crisis is to utilise its immense social power as the engine of the European and world economy to seize control of society from the super-rich. Production must be organised not on the basis of anarchic, cut-throat competition for private profit, but rational, democratic planning to fulfil social needs.

Canada’s military sends nurses to Alberta hospitals as COVID-19 crisis worsens

Dylan Lubao

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage out of control in Alberta, with an increasing number of reports that overwhelmed hospitals are being forced to deny care to patients. On Monday, the Canadian Armed Forces deployed a contingent of eight critical care nurses to Edmonton, the provincial capital, to assist with overwhelmed ICUs.

The Delta-driven fourth wave has seen the most hospitalizations in Alberta since the pandemic began, with 1,079 people now actively under care. Alberta Health Services (AHS) reports that out of 347 ICU beds, including recently added “surge” beds, 307 are in use. Dr. Verna Yiu, head of AHS, was forced to admit that hospitals “are only able to keep pace with some of these sort of numbers because, in part, some of our ICU patients have passed away.”

Emergency and ICU departments have essentially been forced to implement aspects of their triage protocols, under which those deemed least likely to survive are denied needed care. Dr. Paul Parks, head of emergency medicine for the Alberta Medical Association, told CTV News that some critically ill COVID-19 patients who would normally be on ventilators in the ICU have been denied them because of a lack of resources and staff.

Dr. Parks warned that full implementation of triage is not far off. This would include making decisions about which patients, including children, would receive life-saving care, and potentially removing some COVID-stricken patients from ventilators. AHS has been forced to cancel approximately 8,500 surgeries since August, including 805 pediatric surgeries, as the health care system simply cannot cope. Some twenty pregnant women were treated for COVID-19 symptoms in Alberta’s hospitals during August and September. At least one tragically lost her life.

Further pressure is building on the health care system from the as yet poorly understood impact of Long COVID. According to an article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, 80 percent of patients treated in an Alberta hospital for COVID-19 returned to the emergency room within one month of being discharged. Out of those who returned, 17 percent were readmitted to hospital.

Under these conditions, the arrival of the military nurses, along with 20 medical professionals from the Canadian Red Cross and five or six intensive care staff from Newfoundland and Labrador, is woefully inadequate. The CAF nurses would add, at most, resources for five ICU beds.

Since Premier Jason Kenney announced in July that Alberta was “Open for summer” and subsequently dropped all public health measures to stop the spread of the virus, the number of new COVID-19 cases has rapidly risen to over 1,500 per day. On average, 15 people are dying every day, reaching levels unseen since the second wave of the pandemic last winter, before vaccines were made widely available to the public.

UCP Premier Jason Kenney and Alberta Chief Medical Office Deena Hinshaw have pursued a ruinous pandemic reopening policy modelled after that implemented by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

One of the main vectors for transmission of the virus is schools, which were opened with literally no mitigation measures by the United Conservative Party (UCP) government a month ago. Kenney and his ministers claimed that school was the safest place for children to be, suspended all contact tracing, and ordered health authorities not to release infection numbers in schools or identify schools with outbreaks.

Government data shows that children aged 5 to 9 have the highest infection rate of any age group, registering a staggering 726.7 infections per 100,000 people as of October 4. Children aged 10 to 19 were the second-most infected, at 548.4 per 100,000. Underscoring the role of schools as a primary vector of infection, adults aged 30 to 50 experienced similar infection rates, indicating that parents are catching the virus from their school-aged children.

In response to widespread public anger at the raging spread of the virus in schools, the Edmonton Public School Board appealed Tuesday to the UCP government to close all schools in the province for at least two weeks. This desperate plea came just days after the board reported that at least one COVID-19 case had been detected in over three-quarters of its schools.

To contain mounting popular outrage, the UCP government has reintroduced a few token measures, including contact tracing and rapid testing in schools. These measures, entirely necessary as part of a comprehensive eradication strategy, are totally inadequate to deal with the current crisis.

The Canadian Medical Association and the Alberta Medical Association have both appealed to ordinary Albertans to lobby the government for a firebreak lockdown of schools and economic activity until the situation in hospitals can be stabilized. The AMA’s open letter declares, “The time to act is now. Dire times call for drastic measures.”

A petition circulating on Change.org demanding the resignation of Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw and the implementation of a firebreak lockdown collected over 1,700 signatures in the first two days. This action comes on the heels of well-attended and widely-supported protests over the summer against the UCP’s reopening drive, which were led by doctors and other medical professionals, independently of the trade unions. Numerous grassroots groups of parents, teachers, and health care workers devoted to opposing the herd immunity policy have also been established.

A ThinkHQ poll released on Monday shows that Kenney’s popularity has nose-dived. Of 1,100 respondents, 77 percent disapproved of Kenney’s leadership during the pandemic, including 61 percent who strongly disapproved. Even among those who voted UCP in the last election, Kenney’s approval does not exceed 40 percent.

Yet this healthy class anger towards Kenney, an unalloyed representative of the banks and big business, finds no political expression in official channels. The Trudeau Liberal government kept quiet during the summer as Kenney dismantled COVID-19 protections, and only shifted to criticizing him when it suited the Liberals’ electoral needs during the federal election campaign. While the New Democratic Party opposition has attacked Kenney and the UCP for their disastrous handling of the pandemic, the NDP when in power carried out steep cuts to health care and other public services, earning them the ire of millions of working class Albertans and leading to their ouster after one term in office. Moreover, the NDP government in neighbouring British Columbia is pursuing essentially the same pandemic policy as Kenney.

The union bureaucracy, for its part, has done everything in its power to smother and sabotage all social opposition. With hospitals on the verge of implementing triage protocols and schools infested with the virus, the Alberta Federation of Labour, with 175,000 members, has not organized a single protest or proposed that workers take any action. In its latest statement, the union body merely issued a polite appeal to the “provincial and federal governments,” the same governments responsible for the unfolding health care catastrophe.

In a recent interview with CTV, Heather Smith, the president of the United Nurses Alberta union, explicitly discouraged any talk of strikes or protests, insisting, “It’s time to take action, not political, but health action.” The Alberta Teachers Association, besides tepidly calling for a vaccine mandate for its members, has been virtually silent as thousands of educators and their students are exposed to and catch a deadly virus.