Australia: Immigration employees take industrial action in public sector dispute

Oscar Grenfell

Workers from the Department of Immigration and Border Force (DIBF) launched limited industrial action on Monday, as part of an ongoing dispute over federal public sector wages and conditions.

As many as 100,000 federal public sector workers in departments covered by the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) have gone almost three years without an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement.

The dispute centres on the government’s demands for a sweeping overhaul of working conditions, aimed at slashing costs, and capped wage increases below the rate of inflation, which will result in real wage cuts for many employees. Because the government has asserted that any agreement will not be backdated, the conflict has resulted in most of the CPSU’s public sector members being hit with an effective three-year wage freeze.

While there is widespread opposition to the government’s attacks among workers, the CPSU has done everything it can to prevent the development of an industrial and political fight against the measures. Instead the union has issued pathetic appeals to the government for negotiations, and has promoted illusions that a Labor Party government would be an alternative.

The current strike action is along these lines. It involves rolling stoppages of just 30 minutes at cruise ship terminals, cargo facilities and international airports. The union has stated that the action will continue until October 9. It has not provided any details on when and where members will go on strike.

Despite the limited character of the stoppages, a series of commentaries in the financial press have declared that the action is likely to lead to delays at international airports.

A statement by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection likewise commented: “This proposed strike action flies in the face of this bargaining process and represents an unreasonable and unwarranted escalation at a time the department is looking to find consensus.”

Federal Liberal-National senator and former minister for industrial relations Eric Abetz also denounced the stoppage and said that the union was being “unrealistic.”

Some prominent figures have called for the government to step-in and ban the strike altogether.

On Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a comment by Dr John Moyne of the Australian Strategic and Policy Institute (ASPI), a government-connected think tank, which denounced the industrial action as “an unacceptable risk to airport security during the school holidays.” Moyne encouraged the government to make legislative changes to the employment conditions of Border Force workers, in order to prevent them from taking any industrial action.

“National security” has previously been invoked by the government, and the union, to suppress strike action by Border Force employees.

In March, the CPSU cancelled scheduled 24-hour strikes after the Liberal-National government issued vague terrorism warnings in the wake of attacks at Brussels airport in Belgium. The union’s move created a dangerous precedent for any industrial or political struggle to be suppressed at the say-so of the government. In April, an injunction by the government’s Fair Work Commission banned strike action by Border Force employees on the grounds of “national security.”

According to the Australian, in the latest dispute the union has 50 exemptions in place “to ensure national security and the safety of the general public.” The union has nevertheless accused the department of “strike breaking.” It has alleged that the department is engaging in “surge deployment,” whereby employees are transferred in order to cover the work of their striking colleagues.

The strike action follows a new offer from the department, reported on by the CPSU at the beginning of the month. According to the union, the new deal retains cuts to working conditions contained in previous offers, and reduces average pay raises contained in the last proposed agreement from an average of 6 percent over three years, to just 4.7 percent. The CPSU has claimed that under the offer, some staff would face real cuts to take-home pay.

Repeated government offers have included clauses to strip allowances, which in some cases could leave workers $8,000 worse off per year. The government is also seeking to abolish existing workplace entitlements and allowances, including for flexible working hours.

Workers also face the prospect of the reinstatement of a host of cuts to pay and conditions first implemented in July 2015 when the government merged Australian Customs, Border Protection Service and the Department of Immigration to form the DIBF. The union has claimed that as many as 800 jobs are set to be slashed across the department.

As in a number of other public sector departments, DIBF staff have repeatedly voted down government offers in large numbers. An agreement in September 2015 was rejected by 91 percent of employees and a similar offer in May 2016 was voted down by 81 percent of workers.

There are indications, however, of mounting frustration and hostility among workers towards the CPSU’s attempts to limit opposition to isolated strikes and protests. A one-day strike called by the union on September 9 across a number of departments appears to have been boycotted by a substantial number of workers, including in departments that have overwhelmingly rejected government offers.

On the day of the strike, the union held pathetic protests outside the offices of Liberal-National MPs. The events, which were attended in most capital cities by as few as 50 union officials and workers, were aimed at suppressing any serious political discussion. There were no speeches, with union officials merely posing for media photos and leading chants of “Come on Malcolm, come on,” directed to the conservative prime minister.

According to John Lloyd, the Public Service Commissioner, only 730 Tax Office workers took part in the strike action, out of a workforce of almost 20,000. Lloyd claimed that 5,000 Department of Human Services employees participated in the stoppage, out of over 34,000 employees, and that none of its offices were closed.

In the Department of the Environment and Energy only 36 of 2,400 participated and in the Department of Parliamentary Services just 27 out of 894 employees took part. Among Immigration and Border Force workers, the participation was reportedly 4 percent.

The union has continued to signal that it is willing to work with the government to slash the conditions of the workers it falsely claims to represent. CPSU national secretary, Nadine Flood stated at the beginning of the latest strike that “In our view, the best way to avert this protected industrial action would be for the government to choose to either seek a sensible resolution through discussions or to take the CPSU to the Fair Work Commission and allow the independent umpire to [resolve] the matter.”

At the same time, the union is campaigning for Labor Party candidates in the Australian Capital Territory elections, and is presenting them as “pro-public sector.” In reality, it was the Labor government of Bob Hawke that introduced efficiency dividends, mandating an annual funding cut to the public sector, in the late 1980s. The measure has been used by successive governments to decimate the jobs and conditions of public sector workers, including by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, which presided over the destruction of up to 14,500 federal public sector jobs.

Infrastructure breakdown plunges Australian state into darkness

Mike Head

In an unprecedented breakdown of essential infrastructure, an entire Australian state was blacked out on Wednesday night after a severe storm damaged electricity transmission towers.

Power went out across South Australia, with a population of 1.7 million, at about 3.45pm in the midst of drenching rains, lightning and thunder, throwing the state into chaos. The cause was not a lack of base load power, but a cascading shut down of the state’s transmission system.

According to Electranet, the private company that operates the South Australian grid, storm cells damaged more than 20 towers at five different points in the network. It seems that the whole system rapidly shut down because of power surges, and that triggered the cutting off of supply cables from the neighbouring state of Victoria.

Without warning, residents suddenly lost all power. About 900,000 homes were in darkness and use of mobile phones began to be threatened by the lack of electricity. State Emergency Services officials said almost 1,000 calls for assistance were received over the following 24 hours. There were no reports of lives lost, but widespread traffic accidents were caused.

In the capital, Adelaide, a city of 1.3 million people, the public transport system was paralysed. Trains and trams were shut down. Roads were gridlocked as traffic lights failed, street lights stopped operating and railway level crossing boom gates were stuck in the down position for hours.

Thousands of people were stranded in the city, with Adelaide Town Hall opened to people unable to return home. People were trapped in lifts and fire alarms blared throughout the city as the power ceased. At Adelaide airport, outgoing flights were grounded and only one of two back-up generators was working.

Standby generators failed at a major Adelaide hospital, forcing 17 patients to be transferred to another hospital. Some needed help breathing with manual respirators as they were taken from Flinders Medical Centre to Flinders Private Hospital, health officials revealed. Generators reportedly functioned at other public hospitals, but some medical operations were interrupted and so-called elective surgeries were postponed.

Major damage was threatened at the Whyalla steelworks, where production stopped and the blast furnace cooled rapidly. Other large industrial and mining projects were affected, forcing BHP Billiton to temporarily shut down the Olympic Dam copper and gold mine, and Oz Minerals to do the same at its Prominent Hill mine.

Today, tens of thousands of homes are still without power, mostly in the north and west of the state, and some may remain blacked out for many days. With bad weather continuing, there are fears of more blackouts until the electricity towers and transmission lines are rebuilt.

No such statewide “black system event” has occurred previously in Australia, although general breakdowns hit northern Queensland in 2009 and New South Wales in 1964.

This week’s storm was an extreme weather event. Winds exceeded 90 kilometres an hour, and two tornadoes tore down power lines. There was hail the size of golf balls and more than 80,000 lightning strikes across the state. The Bureau of Meteorology said the storm front and intense low-pressure system were the most severe reported in the state in 50 years.

Such events are now likely to occur more frequently, however. The non-government Climate Council attributed the wild weather to erratic patterns generated by climate change. Professor Will Steffen said the storm was “a disturbing preview of what’s likely to come if Australia fails to act on climate change.” He said the atmosphere was packing much more energy, contributing to the increasing intensity of storms.

Clearly, the authorities were not prepared for such a storm, nor was the electricity infrastructure. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the agency responsible for the National Electricity Market, which was established in 1998, said the outage’s “root cause” was likely to be the multiple loss of 275-kilovolt power lines during storm activity.

“These transmission lines form part of the backbone of South Australia’s power station and support supply and generation north of Adelaide,” AEMO said. But it added: “The reason why a cascading failure of the remainder of the South Australian network occurred is still to be identified and is subject to further investigation.”

According to industry experts, once the transmission lines went down, the whole high-voltage power system was cut, in order to protect generators and equipment in South Australia. In addition, to stop the voltage and frequency fluctuations affecting Victoria and the rest of the national market, the two lines (“interconnectors”) connecting South Australia to Victoria were also shut down.

AEMO said ample electricity was being generated in South Australia at the time of the power failure, augmented by supplies from the interconnectors.

Without waiting for any investigation, however, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other senior ministers immediately sought to exploit the disaster to blame South Australia’s almost 40 percent reliance on renewable energy, mainly wind and solar power, for the breakdown.

Experts insisted that the transmission grid would have failed in the storm, regardless of the source of the electricity. But Turnbull demanded that state Labor governments lower their renewable energy targets in line with his Liberal-National Coalition government’s target, which he said was 23.5 percent.

Turnbull declared the blackout was a “wake-up call” for state leaders who were trying to hit “completely unrealistic” renewable targets. “We’ve got to recognise that energy security is the key priority.” Turnbull’s intervention echoed that of the mining industry, which has opposed the closure of coal-fired power stations.

In all the media coverage, no mention has been made of the privatised state of the electricity system in South Australia, where the grid was sold off 15 years ago. Electranet, which controls the state’s network and is responsible for upgrading and maintaining it, is a consortium of China’s state-owned State Grid, Malaysian firm YTL Power Investments and Westpac bank’s Hastings Investment Management.

Whatever the precise causes of the infrastructure failure, it occurred after two decades of privatisation of basic utilities by state governments nationally, placing society’s most critical services in the hands of corporate entities driven by short-term profit requirements. This drive intensified under the last federal Labor government. Its “Energy White Paper 2012: Australia’s Energy Transformation” demanded that state governments privatise the remaining state-owned electricity assets, then estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, delivering a windfall to the financial markets and associated business interests.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed that this would stop the “gold plating” of energy infrastructure—that is, supposed over-investment in transmission and distribution networks—that the Labor government blamed for escalating power charges for business and households.

Addressing the Energy Policy Institute in August 2012, Gillard branded as excessive expenditure on upgrading transmission and distribution networks to avoid blackouts during periods of peak demand. She compared such spending to “building a ten lane freeway but with two lanes that are only used or needed for one long weekend.”

In fact, outdated and poorly maintained networks have led to electricity shortages during extreme weather conditions that have caused deaths, as well as severe dislocation. In the summer of 2009, record temperatures in Victoria and South Australia saw the national power wholesaler impose rolling blackouts, without notice, on hundreds of thousands of households. More than 60 people died from heat stress.

Today, climate change is causing what were “once in 50 years” weather events to occur at an increasing rate in Australia, as elsewhere around the world. Yet the dictates of the capitalist market, enforced by successive governments, are lessening society’s capacity to cope with the resulting disasters. Access to reliable and affordable energy is a basic social right, but it is being subordinated to the interests of big business and finance capital, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Berlin police shoot Iraqi refugee

Verena Nees

On Tuesday evening, police shot dead a 29-year-old Iraqi refugee in Berlin. According to reports, police responded when the refugee sought to attack a fellow refugee from Pakistan with a knife. Apparently the Iraqi suspected his Pakistani roommate of sexually abusing his six-year-old daughter.

The police were called in the evening to a shelter for refugees in the Kruppstrasse in Berlin Moabit, as the confrontation raged between the Iraqi father and a 27-year-old Pakistani. The fatal shooting is alleged to have taken place as the suspected Pakistani already sat handcuffed in a police car. The Iraqi refugee suddenly stormed the car and, according to witnesses, shouted: “You will not survive.”

Martin Steltner, the speaker for the Berlin public prosecutor stated that “several shots from a number of service weapons” had been fired. Investigations are being conducted of the officials concerned. The young Iraqi father of three children died during the night from his gunshot wounds.

On Wednesday morning the refugee aid organization “Moabit helps” posted a message on Facebook stating. “It is becoming ever more tragic…The refugees are subject to one humiliation after another. Inhumane accommodation, no privacy, untreated ... this family has fled to us and now has to experience such a thing.”

Initially the affected refugees were to have been temporarily housed in an inflated structure situated in the middle of Berlin. Now, over a year later, the use of the hanger has been extended by the Senate until 2017. “These cabins cannot be locked by the refugees. No protection, no security. In summer unbearably hot, in winter the air, it is a nightmarish soundscape.”

Diana Henniges, director of “Moabit helps,” roots both the conflict between the two residents and the alleged sexual assault of the Iraqi child in the prevailing conditions.

“Actually such structures are suitable for tennis,” Diana Henniges told the WSWS, “and not for storing people.” The City Mission that operates the accommodation opened it at the end of 2014 as a refuge for the homeless in winter. In the meantime, it has been packed with refugees living in two barely separated spaces—one for families with children, the other for single men.

The appalling conditions in the refugee structure are similar to those prevailing in the airplane hangars of former Tempelhof airport, where there have been a series of suicide attempts.

The refugees are also subject to resignation and depression, having waited many months for the processing of their asylum applications without housing, without work, without training and integration and under the constant threat of deportation.

“This long, long time of waiting, so many months, is what breaks people's hearts,” said Christiane Beckmann of “Moabit helps.” One should imagine what it is like to spend a year living in such an undignified mass accommodation, in a cabin without a roof, having to stand in a queue every day for food, along with hundreds of other people from different countries and speaking different languages.

“Recently, a Syrian said to me: With Assad there was murder, there was filth, there was persecution—but we had our dignity as human beings. Here I lose my dignity!”

A proper review of the police shooting of the young Iraqi can only be undertaken after the investigation, according to the two speakers from “Moabit helps.” “It was certainly not the intention of the police to shoot someone,” Diana Henniges told the WSWS. However, the law-and-order campaigns of the Berlin Senate and the demands for better-armed police have led to a situation in which “the police intervention is ever more massive.”

When two refugees fought with one another at LaGeSo (now called LAF, State Office for Refugee Affairs) six policemen appeared immediately, they reported. “You only have to mention the word refugee and there is immediately a huge contingent of police.”

On Wednesday the state chairman of the German police union, Bodo Pfalzgraf, defended the police action to the state broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, arguing that the police had prevented vigilante justice and a life-threatening situation for themselves. He stated that the “very dynamic situation” in which there was a reaction time of fractions of a second, meaning that the police could not fire a non-lethal shot. In such situations the entire body of the attacker was deemed a target area.

At the same time, Pfalzgraf and the CDU took advantage of the event to demand a quicker introduction of potentially deadly tasers. The former Interior Minister, Henkel announced a test run with these weapons in two downtown districts shortly before being voted out of office in the recent Berlin election.

The death of the refugee in Tuesday night is an indictment of the Berlin Senate and the federal government. Against a background of deplorable anti-refugee tirades in the media, the government and all of the established parties have responded to the rise of the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany) with ever sharper attacks on refugees and their right to asylum and by beefing up the state.

The Left Party and the Greens, who are currently discussing forming a coalition with the SPD in Berlin, have made their own thinly veiled appeals for arming the police. On Wednesday the interior policy expert of the Left group in the Berlin House of Representatives, Hakan Tas, made no basic criticism of the fatal shooting. Instead he merely called for a check of whether the police officers had regular shooting practice and whether the shots were justified.

A few days ago, the parliamentary group chairman of the Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht, told the FAZ newspaper, “We have always criticized cuts in police personnel. We are not the party of the weak state but want a state well equipped to fulfill its tasks.” In the same breath Wagenknecht spoke out in favour of a limit on refugees.

Push to install right-wing Spanish government splits Socialist Party

Alejandro Lopez & Alex Lantier

On Wednesday afternoon, half of the Federal Executive of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) resigned, in an inner-party putsch aimed at forcing the installation of a new right-wing government. The violent infighting now tearing apart the PSOE—a key instrument of capitalist rule in Spain, which has governed the country for 25 of the 38 years since the end of the fascist Franco regime—testifies to the historic character of the country’s current political crisis.

It has been nine months since Spain last had a government; the December 20 and June 26 elections both produced hung parliaments. On Wednesday, former Prime Minister Felipe González denounced current PSOE General Secretary Pedro Sánchez for refusing to back the installation of a minority, right-wing Popular Party (PP) government and pledged to abstain from voting against it when such a government was proposed in parliament.

While visiting Chile, González denounced Sánchez’s line, warning that it threatens to provoke a crisis of rule in Spain. “I feel cheated by Sánchez, he told me [previously] he would abstain in the second vote” on a PP government, González said, adding that Sánchez had “frustrated” him.

“If he has changed positions, since then he has not explained them to anyone, and he will have his reasons. I do not understand them,” declared González. “A third set of elections would be madness, it could bring about a crisis of the system.”

As reports of González’s statements emerged in Spain, 17 members of the PSOE Federal Executive resigned. These included former Defence Minister Carme Chacón, PSOE President Micaela Navarro, PSOE spokesman Carlos Pérez, and a variety of regional officials from the PSOE stronghold of Andalucía, as well as Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia and Castilla-La Mancha.

Sánchez, for his part, said that he “respects the opinions expressed about the current political situation” by González, but added, “It is the PSOE Federal Committee that sets the PSOE’s line on the matter of the investiture of [PP Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy.”

The anti-Sánchez faction, which is apparently drawn primarily from the top PSOE bureaucracy, have launched a bid to take over the party. They claim that the 17 resignations, plus 3 previous vacancies in the 35-seat Federal Executive, mean that Sánchez is no longer general secretary and that the PSOE should be handed over to a caretaker leadership.

In fact, Article 36 of the PSOE’s Federal Statutes specify that “when the vacancies in the Federal Executive affect the General Secretariat, or half plus one of its members, the Federal Committee must call for an Extraordinary Congress to elect the new Federal Executive.”

Yesterday, Sánchez therefore went on to call an extraordinary congress.

Conflicts inside the PSOE continued to escalate, however, as pro- and anti-Sánchez factions both claimed to control the party, and protests erupted outside PSOE headquarters in several cities. Andalucía PSOE chief Susana Díaz sent PSOE Federal Executive Committee President Verónica Pérez to PSOE headquarters in Madrid, where Pérez claimed she was now the “sole authority” in the PSOE. Pro-Sánchez officials barred her from entering the building, however, while PSOE members outside the building shouted “traitor” at her.

Most of the regional PSOE federations came out against Sánchez, while Catalonia, the Basque Country and Navarra came out in favour, with Catalan PSOE leader Miquel Iceta announcing plans to bus PSOE members to Madrid to defend Sánchez.

Pro-PSOE daily El País, which has issued increasingly vitriolic denunciations of Sánchez in recent days, called him an “unscrupulous fool.” It explained that Sánchez was “breaking with the commitments to his party colleagues, who subordinate any internal move to the formation of a government”—that is, a regime of the PP and Rajoy.

González, El País, and the various PSOE factions fighting to install a PP government are trampling on the views of PSOE supporters and voters. A recent poll conducted by Metroscopia showed that 50 percent supported Sánchez’s “no” to Rajoy, while 43 percent preferred that the PSOE abstain and return the PP to power. This underlies both the hysterical tone and the contempt for legal procedures with which the anti-Sánchez faction is conducting their power grab.

It is highly significant that the power grab was launched by González, the PSOE’s main founder in the post-Franco era. González not only led the reconstruction of the party, with aid from German and French social democratic parties, but spearheaded the 1979 campaign during which the PSOE officially renounced Marxism and pledged its loyalty to capitalism.

The PSOE, like social democratic parties across Europe, is a party of bourgeois order. It has been discredited by years of austerity policies conducted by PSOE Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, who participated in the war in Afghanistan and launched deep attacks on the working class at home, especially in the years after the 2008 Wall Street crash.

González’s remark that he fears a crisis of rule in Spain reflects the growing anxiety gripping the Spanish and other ruling elites over the political situation in Europe. The European Union (EU) has not dared impose further austerity measures while Spain has no government, due to the EU’s growing unpopularity. Britain’s recent vote to exit the EU not only highlighted this unpopularity, but also made EU officials more reluctant to proceed quickly, given fears that politically explosive opposition could soon emerge.

They are determined, however, to obtain detailed pledges for more social cuts from Spain and Portugal at a conference slated for October. The PSOE would be more than happy to issue such pledges.

From the standpoint of workers, however, the war and social policies of Sánchez are indistinguishable from those of González and the rest of the PSOE machine. He is simply pursuing a different tack to try to prevent a total collapse of the PSOE. He orients more to the pseudo-left Podemos party—the Spanish ally of the Syriza government in Greece, which is now infamous for its massive social cuts.

This manoeuvre is an attempt to give the PSOE a false image as a “left” opponent of the PP. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort, as its history shows. Moreover, it rapidly became clear yesterday that the political offensive launched by González had been coordinated with the PP. Yesterday, reports surfaced indicating that the PP caretaker government had known of plans to remove Sánchez as PSOE general secretary since last week, and that they were closely following the conflict inside the PSOE.

Details allegedly were passed on between caretaker Prime Minister Rajoy’s chief of staff Jorge Moragas and González’s former chief of staff, José Enrique Serrano. Caretaker Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo has also boasted of his close ties with González and Zapatero.

Crisis at Germany’s Deutsche Bank intensifies

Ulrich Rippert

Following a 7.5 percent plunge in its shares at the beginning of the week, the fragility of Deutsche Bank was again demonstrated yesterday when its shares fell a further 7 percent in afternoon trading on Wall Street, following a Bloomberg report that about 10 hedge funds were cutting their exposure to Germany’s largest bank.

While the funds involved constitute only a small fraction of the more than 200 clients engaged in derivatives trading with the bank, it was enough to send its shares plummeting. Deutsche was forced to reissue a statement asserting that the “vast majority” of its clients have a full understanding of “our stable financial position” and the litigation process involving a $14 billion fine imposed on it by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) over its sub-prime mortgage dealings.

As Bloomberg noted, while the vast majority of clients had taken no action, the “hedge funds’ move highlights concerns among some counterparties about doing business with Europe’s largest investment bank.”

Such has been the fall in the value of the bank’s shares that the DoJ fine is almost equivalent to its current market capitalisation.

As Deutsche’s financial woes deepened, Germany’s second largest bank announced a drastic restructuring program on Thursday. Commerzbank will cut one in five jobs, a total of 9,600 positions.

Commerzbank chief Martin Zielke sought to portray the cuts as part of a technical restructuring plan. The bank would become a “digital technology company,” a press release stated. The firm would “concentrate strictly on its core businesses, digitalise 80 percent of their related processes and achieve significant improvements in efficiency,” the Commerzbank declared.

As at Deutsche Bank, however, the problems at Commerzbank are deeper. Commerzbank shares reached an all-time low in early August. Operating profit declined by 40 percent in the first six months of the year. An interim report by the bank’s board pointed out that “the operating result and the company result will be below last year.”

At the time, Der Spiegel commented: “What sounds so sober in the interim report is actually explosive, because it shows how bad things really are at Germany’s second-largest bank.”

Commerzbank was hit hard by the 2008 economic crisis. Immediately prior to that, it intensified its cooperation with the now largely dismantled Eurohypo, which provided financing for property and governments, and subsequently organised the risky takeover of the Dresdner Bank. The impact of the financial crash on Commerzbank was so severe that it had to be rescued with €18.2 billion in taxpayers’ money. Since then, the federal state has been the largest shareholder in Commerzbank  with around 15 percent of its stock.

It remains unknown whether a joint strategy is being worked on within the finance ministry to deal with the crises at Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank  However, it is clear that an emergency plan is being discussed for Deutsche Bank. Die Zeit reported on Wednesday that regardless of denials from government spokesman Seibert and Deutsche Bank head John Cryan, “the federal government and the responsible financial supervisory authorities” are working on a rescue plan. In the worst-case scenario, the state will directly participate in financing the bank. An investment of 25 percent was being discussed, Die Zeit reported.

The fact that a rescue plan is even being discussed shows how explosive the situation is. The collapse of Deutsche Bank would have consequences going far beyond the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the crash of 2008.

The immediate cause of the current crisis is the fine imposed by the US Justice Department of $14 billion (roughly €12.5 billion) due to illegal business dealings in property loans, which played a central role in the financial meltdown eight years ago. But this has come on top of an ongoing share market decline.

Compared to 2006, Deutsche Bank’s share price had lost almost 90 percent of its value by September 2016. The bank is only worth €16 billion today. This is less than the building materials manufacturer HeidelbergCement, according to Focus-Online. Among Europe’s “system relevant” banks, Deutsche Bank has one of the weakest capital positions, and the most derivatives.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Deutsche Bank is the most dangerous financial institution in the world with regard to “systemic risks in the financial sector.”

DB does not only stand for Deutsche Bank, but also “derivative bomb,” wrote Focus-Online. It described the situation in the following terms: “Deutsche Bank’s derivative exposure of almost €46 trillion is an explosive risk—almost 17 times greater than Germany’s annual economic output—and this with capital of €61 billion! These loans run off the books and completely lack transparency. If just 5 percent of the derivatives blow up in their face, it will soon be lights out in Frankfurt.”

Derivatives are financial instruments that serve to transfer risk. They are highly speculative and operate on the verge of legality.

Since 2012, Deutsche Bank has had to cough up €12.7 billion for legal disputes. The issues included money laundering, tax fraud and interest rate manipulation. $2.5 billion and €725 million had to be paid for the illegal fixing of the Libor and Euribor inter-bank interest rates, and €1.9 billion for disputes over mortgage loans.

Deutsche Bank’s situation sheds light on the deepening crisis of Europe’s financial system. This is clearly on display in Italy. Despite the privatisation measures of three successive governments (Mario Monti, Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi), Italian state debt has risen from €1.8 trillion in 2011 to €2.2 trillion today, or 133 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Since the beginning of 2008, GDP has contracted by 8 percent. The total sum of toxic loans held by the banks has doubled and currently amounts to €360 billion, or one fifth of all loans. Of these, loans worth €200 billion are considered irretrievably lost.

Although the German economy has to date been described as the eurozone’s engine, it is now clear how unstable and precarious the situation is. In parallel with the crisis at Deutsche Bank, financial daily Handelsblatt published an article on Thursday on declining projections for economic growth. Under the title “Year of uncertainties,” the newspaper reported that for the coming year, economic researchers expect “nothing close to robust growth.” The reason given was political uncertainties “which could impact an export-dependent economy like Germany—beginning with the US elections, the Brexit and the developments in China.”

The British Daily Telegraph is already speculating about the end of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and the euro, warning: “If the German government does not stand behind the bank, then inevitably all its counter-parties—the other banks and institutions it deals with—are going to start feeling very nervous about trading with it … If Deutsche does go down, it is looking increasingly likely that it will take Merkel with it—and quite possibly the euro as well.”

Under conditions of deepening turmoil, trans-Atlantic relations are growing increasingly tense. Significantly, the fine for Deutsche Bank was imposed not, as usually would be the case, by the US financial regulator, but the US Department of Justice. The earlier decision by the EU to impose a €13 billion tax bill on Apple provoked outrage among US firms and at the US Treasury.

Declarations from Berlin and Paris that negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which the US was striving to conclude, were being abandoned were also greeted with frustration in Washington.

Last summer, the first accusations were raised that Deutsche Bank had laundered rubles worth a total of $6 billion. Several employees in the bank’s Moscow office were fired as a result. Now the US Department of Justice and New York’s financial supervisory authority are going a step further and reviewing whether the bank was in breach of sanctions.

In contrast to the financial breakdown of 2008, when a limited degree of international cooperation and joint crisis management was practiced, all the major powers are responding today to the prospect of a renewed economic crisis with national recriminations and harsh measures against each other. The global economic and financial system is increasingly becoming a battlefield torn by national antagonisms. This is not only intensifying the economic predicament, but also encouraging the arms race and the global preparations for war.

JIT investigation blames Russia for MH17 crash in Ukraine

Alex Lantier

On Wednesday, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) into the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine issued its much-awaited report on the horrific crash.

The loss of MH17 and the unsolved murder of all 298 people aboard over separatist-held eastern Ukraine, on 17 July 2014, set off an explosive confrontation between NATO and Russia, as US and European officials and media charged that Moscow had shot down the jetliner. In August 2014, the NATO investigation was handed over to the JIT. The JIT included officials of several countries who lost citizens in the crash—Holland, Australia, and Belgium—and from the far-right CIA-backed regime in Ukraine.

From the outset, the JIT was beset by scandal and evidence of bias. It first excluded Malaysia, then relegated it to a secondary role as a provider of information. Then, Dutch news magazine Elsevier revealed that JIT proceedings are controlled by a secret pact giving each member, Ukraine included, veto power over what is revealed. The Dutch state invoked the state secrets privilege to block inquiries into this matter.

The report, which produced little new evidence and drew heavily on Ukrainian sources likely to be biased, was greeted with reservation by sections of the European press. But in the United States, the media, led by the New York Times, charged that the report presented damning and irrefutable evidence of Russian complicity in the downing of MH17.

“With meticulous detail, working with cellphone records, social media, witness accounts, and other evidence, the prosecutors traced Russia’s role in deploying the missile system into Ukraine and its attempts to cover its tracks afterward,” the New York Times wrote.

The day after the report’s publication, the Times seized upon its findings to declare Russia an “Outlaw State” in its lead editorial. Denouncing the “unconscionable behavior” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Times hinted that the Obama Administration is preparing to take a more directly confrontational stance toward Russia, particularly in Syria.

The JIT report, issued on the website of the Dutch public prosecutor, shows that MH17 was shot down by a mobile Buk surface-to-air missile battery. This is now the consensus view of NATO and Russian officials, but in and of itself it proves little, since both Ukrainian and Russian forces are armed with Buk missiles.

Specifically, the JIT alleges that the Buk launcher involved in the attack came from Russia but crossed into Ukraine for a day, firing a missile at MH17 from the village of Pervomaiskyi, near the town of Snizhne. This contradicts Russian claims that the Buk was fired by Ukrainian forces from a Ukrainian-held town, Zaroshchenskoye.

“Based on the results of the criminal investigation, it may be concluded that flight MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014, by a 9M38-series missile from a Buk missile launcher [that] was brought from the territory of the Russian Federation and, after launch, subsequently returned to the Russian Federation territory,” said Dutch National Police official Wilbert Paulissen, introducing the report.

The materials published by the JIT—a brief, two-page report and six short YouTube videos—do not, however, provide sufficient evidence to substantiate its accusations. Indeed, in the course of two years of work, the JIT did not obtain any independent information that it saw fit to publish yesterday.

The JIT neither released data from MH17’s black box—which was taken from Malaysian authorities two years ago and sent to Britain, where it has not been heard from since—nor radar data on eastern Ukraine provided by Moscow. Nor did it publish US radar and satellite data on the area. Instead, it relied on wiretaps, photos and a few brief videos posted by unidentified users to Ukrainian social media and apparently collected by Ukrainian intelligence.

The JIT’s six YouTube videos are all made up of computer-generated images produced by the JIT to illustrate what it alleges took place. Every so often, the CGI video is interspersed with unidentified social media pictures or a few brief videos. In short, the JIT videos are not credible or independent evidence on who fired the Buk that brought down MH17.

The JIT claims to have tracked the launcher that shot down MH17 and identified “approximately 100 people” involved in guarding, transporting, and controlling it. To this effect, the JIT cites cellphone data and several wiretapped phone calls, apparently between unidentified separatist officials, who discuss moving vehicles and express confusion and concern over the MH17 shoot-down.

The JIT report does not, however, identify them, establish what motive or order they would have had to destroy MH17, or indeed assign any broader political responsibility for the MH17 attack.

Paulissen himself tacitly acknowledged the weakness of the JIT report, saying that the JIT was not blaming the Russian state or Russian individuals for the attack. “We have determined that the weapons came from the Russian Federation. Having established this, we do not make statements about the participation of the Russian Federation as a nation or people from the Russian Federation,” he said.

Significantly, reports emerged that the Dutch government itself lacks confidence in the conclusions it is itself drawing in the JIT report. “If Dutch authorities are prudent and refuse to draw any conclusions, it’s also because the most conclusive evidence found til now—the recordings of conversations—come from the SBU, the Ukrainian intelligence service,” wrote Le Monde.The daily cited a diplomat in The Hague: “This organization [the SBU] served the old regime and changed its loyalties to the new regime without changing its methods.”

Russian officials criticized the JIT report. “Instead of [working together], international investigators suspended Moscow from comprehensive participation in the investigative process, allowing our efforts only a minor role. It sounds like a bad joke, but at the same time they made Ukraine a full member of the JIT, giving it the opportunity to forge evidence and turn the case to its advantage,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Russian officers had previously maintained their allegations that Ukrainian forces were responsible for shooting down the plane. “The Ukrainian side has air situation data in the area of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 crash from both civilian and military sources. The fact that Ukraine has not published radar data leads us to the conjecture that the missile, if it was a Buk, was launched from territory under the control of the Ukrainian military,” said Andrey Koban, the head of Russian Air Force radar operations.

At present, all that can be said is that the question of who shot down MH17 remains unresolved, primarily due to blatant interference in the investigation by the NATO powers.

From a political standpoint, however, there is no doubt as to where responsibility for the MH17 shoot-down lies: it is squarely with Washington and its European allies. In 2014, these countries backed a violent, pro-European putsch in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev that brought to power far-right and pro-fascist parties hostile to the Russophone population of eastern Ukraine. This broke Ukraine apart, as far-right militias began attacking civilians and provoking armed resistance in eastern Ukraine, which was then supported by Moscow.

Without this flagrant intervention in Ukrainian affairs, the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine would not have emerged, and the fighting in eastern Ukraine which led to the destruction of MH17 would not have begun.

New York Times brands Russia an “outlaw state”

Bill Van Auken

Amid mounting public threats that the US is preparing an escalation of its military intervention in Syria, the New York Times Thursday published a lead editorial branding Russia as an “outlaw state.”

This ratcheting up of rhetoric that has grown increasingly hysterical in regard to Russia is a response to the debacle suffered by US imperialism in its over five-year-long proxy war for regime change in Syria. Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air power, appear to be on the brink of retaking all of the eastern portion of Aleppo, the last major bastion of the US-backed “rebels,” composed principally of Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militias.

Secretary of State John Kerry issued an ultimatum to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov Wednesday: either Russia grounds both its own and the Syrian government’s warplanes, or Washington will break off all negotiations with Moscow on Syria.

The significance of this threat was further spelled out in a press briefing by State Department spokesman John Kirby, who told reporters that as a consequence of Russia failing to bow to US demands, “extremists and extremist groups will continue to…expand their operations, which will include, no question, attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities, and Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and they will continue to lose resources—even, perhaps, more aircraft.”

The provocative and utterly reckless character of Kirby’s remarks was no accident. That Washington intended to communicate a threat to unleash CIA-sponsored terrorism against Russia was underscored by a Washington Post column by Philip Gordon, who until last year was the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf. The piece, which warned in its headline that “Russia will pay the price,” used almost identical language, stating that continued Russian action in Syria “could very well result in terrorist attacks against Russia.”

Gordon went on to warn that the Obama administration could take actions to “increase costs on Russia,” adding, “Arming the opposition with shoulder-fired missiles capable of hitting Russian and Syrian planes over Aleppo is among the options.”

The ex-White House aide finally cautioned Moscow that if “Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. president, Putin could be facing a U.S. leader who has long supported a no-fly zone in Syria and robust support for the opposition, has expressed skepticism about Russia’s intentions in Syria, and will be looking to more clearly reassert American leadership in the Middle East.”

It is evident, however, that the question of whether an escalation of the US intervention in Syria can wait until after the US election of November 8 has become the subject of heated debate within the US ruling establishment.

The Reuters news agency cited unnamed senior officials as saying that the Obama administration is considering “tougher responses to the Russian-backed Syrian government assault, including military options,” including the provision of heavier weaponry to the Al Qaeda-linked “rebels” and air strikes on Syrian government positions. (This second option was already put into practice with the September 17 US bombing that killed and wounded close to 200 Syrian troops near Deir Ezzor, which Washington claimed was an accident.)

With its editorial denunciation of Russia as an “outlaw state,” the New York Times is effectively weighing in on the debate within America ruling circles over the US intervention in Syria. It wants a military escalation and it wants it now—against Russia.

The Times writes: “President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria. And Mr. Putin may be assuming that Mr. Obama is unlikely to confront Russia in his final months and with an American election season in full swing. But with the rebel stronghold in Aleppo under threat of falling to the government, administration officials said that such a response is again under consideration.”

To bolster its case, the Times throws in unsubstantiated charges made in an investigation driven entirely by “evidence” supplied by the Ukrainian secret police that Russia was responsible for the July 2014 shootdown of a Malaysia Airline jet over the war-torn Donbass region.

Putin, the newspaper declares, is guilty of “butchering civilians in Syria and Ukraine, annexing Crimea, computer-hacking American government agencies,” and “crushing dissent at home.”

Putin’s government represents Russia’s ruling oligarchy, which enriched itself through the theft of state property during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. Its intervention in Syria, though of a defensive character, in response to US attempts to encircle and isolate Russia, represents the interests of this oligarchy and provides no progressive solution to the catastrophe unleashed by imperialism on Syria and the broader Middle East.

That being said, the crimes of Putin pale in the face of those carried out by successive US administrations, all of them with the complicity and propaganda support of the New York Times.

The US government is responsible for over a million deaths in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more from Afghanistan to Libya and Yemen. It instigated the regime-change operations in both Ukraine and Syria that gave rise to the “butchery” in those countries, much of it inflicted with weapons supplied by the CIA.

Moreover, even as the Times attacked the Russians’ “butchery” in Syria, the Pentagon announced that it is sending another 600 US troops to Iraq to prepare for a siege of Mosul, which, like the previous assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi, will entail massive crimes against the civilian population.

As for Russian computer hacking, the Times speaks on behalf of the US government, which, through the NSA, engages in the most massive spying operation the world has ever seen. And as for “crushing dissent at home,” the US, it should be recalled, is a country where the police murder over 1,000 people every year and the so-called "justice system" keeps some 2 million people behind bars. In brief, the Times editorial is a piece of war propaganda.

The term “outlaw state” was first put into official use by Ronald Reagan. It was later rendered as “rogue state” under Bill Clinton and, then, under George W. Bush, became the “axis of evil.” Invariably, these terms were used to describe oppressed, semi-colonial countries targeted by US imperialism for war and conquest: Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Now, in the pages of the New York Times, the term is used to describe Russia, a country of 146 million people armed with nuclear weapons. The implications could not be more ominous.

While the motivations of the Times editors may include short-term political considerations—the possibility of an “October surprise” in Syria boosting the prospects of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—the anti-Russia propaganda campaign that the newspaper is leading has far deeper roots in the crisis of American capitalism and the protracted drive by US imperialism to overcome its historic decline through the instrument of militarism.

If words have any meaning, the Times editorial is a warning: behind the backs of the people of the United States and the entire planet, the preparations for a third world war are advancing rapidly.

India launches military attacks against Pakistan

Keith Jones

India carried out multiple “surgical” military strikes inside Pakistan over a five-hour period Wednesday night, bringing South Asia perilously close to an all-out war with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Not only would a war between India and Pakistan be the first-ever war between nuclear-armed states; it could rapidly draw in the United States and China on opposed sides.

In anticipation of a Pakistani counterstrike (or so as to provide cover for Indian war preparations), Indian authorities on Thursday ordered the evacuation of all those living within 10 kilometers of the Pakistani border in the Indian states of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denounced Wednesday’s night attack as “unprovoked and naked” Indian “aggression” and called an emergency meeting of his cabinet for today to discuss Islamabad’s response.

India says it attacked seven “terrorist launching pads” on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir; that its forces penetrated up to 3 kilometers inside Pakistani territory; and that they inflicted “significant casualties” on “terrorists and those trying to shield them.”

The military has been tight-lipped about the operation. But Indian media reports, based on official sources, said Indian commandos had crossed into Azad or Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir both on the ground and in helicopter gunships and that their “kills” were in the “double-digits.”

India and Pakistan have passed through repeated war crises over the past quarter-century and in 1999 fought an undeclared war in the remote Kargil region of Indian-held Kashmir. However, New Delhi has not publicly admitted to carrying out military action inside Pakistan for decades for fear that this could trigger a rapid escalation to war and even nuclear-war.

Yesterday’s attack came ten days after anti-Indian Islamist militants attacked the Indian military base at Uri, in the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing eighteen Indian soldiers. Without so much as a cursory investigation, India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government held Islamabad responsible for the attack and vowed it would punish Pakistan.

India’s media, opposition parties, and a long list of retired military officers all joined in the clamour for India to bloody Pakistan.

At a celebratory press conference yesterday, the Indian Army’s Director General of Military Operations, Lt. General Ranbir Singh, said the “surgical strikes” had been aimed at “terrorist teams” positioned across the Line of Control for “launch” into India.

India, Singh claimed, has no further plans for cross-border actions. “However,” he continued ominously, “the Indian Armed Forces are fully prepared to deal with any contingency which may arise.”

Pakistan’s military, meanwhile, is vehemently denying that India mounted any “surgical” cross-border attacks, calling the claim “an illusion” and “fabrication of truth” promoted by India “to create false effects.”

The Pakistani military does concede two of its soldiers were killed and nine others wounded Wednesday night, but is attributing the casualties to cross-border artillery and gunfire—a regular occurrence across the Line of Control (LoC). In its statement challenging India’s claims, the military said that “Pakistan has made it clear that if there is a surgical strike on Pakistani soil,” it “will be strongly responded” to.

Both sides are clearly spreading disinformation—a further sign of how dangerous the situation is.

Take New Delhi’s claim that yesterday’s attack was aimed at preventing the imminent dispersal of terrorist squads into India. It is a transparent, trumped-up pretext for a reckless act of aggression.

The World Socialist Web Site has no brief for Pakistan’s reactionary, communalist ruling elite and its military, which have time and time again trampled on the democratic rights of the Pakistani people and served as a satrap for US imperialism. Having been schooled in the stratagem by the CIA, which enlisted Islamabad as its junior partner in its covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Pakistan has used Islamist terrorists in pursuing its military-strategic rivalry against India, particularly so as to politically suppress and divert the popular opposition to Indian rule in Kashmir along communal lines

But why would Pakistan—which has repeatedly voiced alarm over the military-strategic gap between it and India, a country with a six times greater population and seven times bigger economy—mass terrorists to strike India when New Delhi is already on a war footing?

Rattled by the falling off of Indian’s growth rate after 2010, the India bourgeoisie brought Narendra Modi and his virulently right-wing BJP to power to intensify the exploitation of the working class and assert its great-power ambitions on the world stage. In pursuit of the latter aim, India has integrated itself ever more completely into Washington’s war drive against China and, bolstered by US support, sought to impose itself as the regional hegemon.

While the Indian elite paints the country as an innocent victim of Pakistani “terrorism”, the BJP government has pursued confrontation with Pakistan. Soon after taking office it instructed the military to adopt a more aggressive posture on the LoC, resulting in 2015 in the most prolonged cross-border shelling in a decade. More than a month before the Uri attack, Modi announced that India would leverage the ethno-nationalist insurgency in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan against Islamabad, effectively threatening Pakistan with dismemberment.

Yesterday’s attack was meant to show that New Delhi is ready to take greater risks in advancing its strategic interests and that vis à vis Pakistan it will no longer be bound by the so-called policy of “strategic restraint.”

As for Pakistan’s claims that there were no cross-border strikes, they are simply not credible. Various Pakistani government officials and political leaders have made statements that implicitly or explicitly contradict the military’s version of events. Among these is Defense Minster Khawaja Muhammad Asif, who declared, “If India tries to do this again, we will respond forcefully.”

By denying that India has carried out a military raid inside Pakistan, Islamabad is seeking to avoid further escalation, without having to make a public and, from the reactionary standpoint of capitalist geopolitics, humiliating admission that it won’t make good on its repeated threats to answer any Indian cross-border thrust with a military strike of its own.

This stance however is likely only to encourage the Modi government and the most bellicose sections of the Indian elite who will hold it up as proof of how weakened Pakistan is. Yesterday, the entire political establishment, including the Congress Party and the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) joined forces, including at an all-party meeting convened by the BJP, to celebrate the aggression against Pakistan. The media, meanwhile, went into overdrive to hail the military strikes, amplifying the government’s claims that they were proof of a bolder, more powerful India, and trumpeting the military as veritable heroes.

The strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan, which today threatens the people of South Asia with a nuclear holocaust, is testament to the failure of bourgeois rule. It is rooted in the 1947 communal partition of South Asia into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India, which was implemented by the Congress Party and the Muslim League, the rival parties of the South Asian bourgeoisie, in conjunction with the subcontinent’s departing British colonial overlords.

That said, a huge factor stoking the war danger is Washington’s more than decade-long drive to transform India into a frontline state in its strategic offensive to isolate, encircle and prepare for war with China. Under Modi, India has lined up with the US in the South China Sea dispute and developed closer strategic bilateral and trilateral ties with the US’s key Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. Last month, Modi agreed to allow US warplanes and battleships to make routine use of Indian military bases.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the US has lavished “strategic gifts” on India, giving it access to its most advanced weaponry and creating a special status for it in the world nuclear regulatory regime that has the effect of allowing New Delhi to concentrate the resources of its indigenous nuclear program on nuclear weapons development.

Invariably the strengthening of the Indo-US alliance has been associated with the downgrading of Washington’s ties with Pakistan, which throughout the Cold War was the principal US ally in South Asia.

Islamabad has warned that Washington has overturned the balance of power in South Asia, and that its ever-closer strategic partnership with New Delhi is emboldening India, and fuelling an arms and nuclear arms race, but all to no effect.

Fearing strategic isolation, Pakistan has drawn closer to its long-time ally China. But that has only increased its estrangement from Washington and fuelled its rivalry with India.

Eager to placate New Delhi, Washington likely gave it the green light to “punish” Pakistan, although the Obama administration, which still relies on Pakistan to provide crucial logistical support to the US occupation forces in Afghanistan, has denied it.

Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice called her Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, Wednesday evening just hours before the Indian “surgical strike,” purportedly to give condolences for the Uri attack and express support for India’s fight against terrorism. Press reports suggest Rice’s call was precipitated by concerns over growing complaints in India that Washington has been insufficiently supportive, including for failing to label Pakistan as responsible for the Uri attack.

What is incontrovertible is that US government officials have refused to condemn yesterday’s “surgical strikes” on Pakistan, although they were patently illegal and highly provocative. Instead they have issued ritualistic calls for both sides to show restraint and move toward dialogue.

The US is playing a most dangerous and incendiary game. In pursuit of its anti-China alliance with New Delhi, it is encouraging India’s government, now led by the communally toxic BJP, to pursue an aggressive, but supposedly “calibrated,” policy of diplomatic, economic and military action against Pakistan—a country with which it has fought four wars and that has threatened to meet any large scale Indian attack with the speedy use of its recently deployed “battlefield” or tactical nuclear weapons.

India-Pakistan: Whither Surgical Strike?

Muhammad Faisal

On 29 September, the Indian Army claimed that it had conducted a “surgical strike” along the Line of Control (LoC), in the Pakistani-administered region of Kashmir. Pakistani authorities, both civil and military, quickly rebutted it while confirming that it had responded to “unprovoked” ceasefire violations in four sectors along the LoC earlier that night. These developments came in the wake of deteriorating Islamabad-New Delhi relations with widespread unrest in the Kashmir valley. The present rise in tensions is a direct result of a militant attack on an Indian Army base at Uri, in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir. India blamed the attack on anti-India militants based in Pakistan, while Pakistan vehemently denied the accusation.

 

At present, details of what actually took place along the LoC are scant. Indian claims, however, still need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Yet, the Indian announcement is an admission of violating the ceasefire agreement. Pakistani sources confirm that Indian troops did attack a forward post in the Hot Springs subsector, of the Kotli sector. Indian soldiers taking advantage of physical features of the area had moved close to the Pakistani post and opened fire on the forward post. Pakistani soldiers swiftly retaliated. In the ensuing exchange of small arms and light weapons, the Indian attack was repelled by the Pakistani troops.

 

Earlier in the morning the Pakistan Army’s public relations department announced that Pakistani troops had responded to “unprovoked firing” on four sectors along the LoC during the early hours of the day. It was taken as return of “cross-LoC firing” by most Pakistani analysts and media, in the current volatile environment. In the currently prevailing hostile climate, cross-LoC firing and artillery exchanges were being anticipated by observers. The announcement made by the Indian DGMO and the spokesperson of India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) that India had conducted a “surgical strike,” has obviously increased the tensions.

 

This Indian armed incursion is by no means a “surgical strike.” A surgical strike would mean Indian Army conducting an operation with “boots on ground” across the LoC, deep into Pakistani-administered territory, instead of a forward post. For such an operation, the Indian Army would either have to rely on heli-borne special forces or conduct airstrikes on selected targets using precision-guided munitions (PGMs). Based on the available information, at this time, the Indian military did not go for any of these options.

 

The DGMO of the Indian Army choose to describe a usual ceasefire violation and an attack on a forward Pakistan army post as a “surgical strike.” Most significantly, the Indian DGMO and the MEA spokesman deliberately used ambiguous language to announce violation of ceasefire and called it a “surgical strike.”

 

The Indian DGMO claimed that a “surgical strike was conducted along the LoC,” which means that Indian authorities are essentially claiming that Indian troops did not cross into the Pakistani-administered territory. Meanwhile, the stress on a “surgical strike” was enough to create ambiguity for political purposes. Some were quick to misinterpret this as “Indian boots on Pakistani held territory” scenario, which it certainly was not.

 

Moreover, it is also for the first time that India has admitted to violating the ceasefire agreement in place between the two armies. In the past, the Indian military had blamed the Pakistan Army for violating the ceasefire to assist infiltration across the LoC into the Indian-administered Kashmir. As India reverts to the situation reminiscent of the 1990s, questions would surely be raised by Pakistani military and Foreign Office on the future of the ceasefire agreement and its feasibility. So far, Pakistan has acted responsibly and has not undertaken a counter-attack on a forward Indian post along the LoC.

 

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called an emergency meeting of the cabinet to deliberate further steps, while Pakistani officials are vehemently denying that a surgical strike took place.

 

In rebranding a cross-LoC duel as a surgical strike, Indian military quickly claimed political victory that the Pakistanis have been punished for Uri attack. In a limited war, a side can attack first, but it cannot decide the course of action in the battlefield. Without waiting for the other side to respond first, acknowledge and respond to the “so-called” surgical strike. In Islamabad, this appears to be an attempt to assuage the domestic constituency by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. This, however, sets a dangerous precedent for the future where any side could claim to have undertaken a successful raid/attack and launch a media blitz, thus, worsening the already complex bilateral relations.

 

This attack has raised the prospect of a military escalation as the bilateral relationship takes a plunge and acrimony deepens. Even the future of the 2003 Kashmir ceasefire agreement that has largely kept the peace between two armies for nearly 13 years, is in jeopardy. The nature of this attempt is repeat of cross-LoC duels between the Indian and Pakistani Armies’ pre-ceasefire agreements. Both sides used to attack and capture posts on the opposite sides to gain tactical and operational advantage over the other. Former Indian and Pakistani military officers who have served in operational areas along the LoC during the 1990s have penned accounts of posts exchanging hands for tactical advantages. The latest Indian attack along the LoC can lead to return of violent 1990s when artillery duels were a regular feature of the conflict between Pakistan and India.