#Democracy in Pakistan and the Corrupt Military Generals

[xtruss]

“Pakistan’s Corrupt to their Cores Army Generals, Politicians, Election Commission and Judges” Can Keep Imran Khan Out of Power, but It Can’t Keep His Popularity Down

— By Charlie Campbell | January 17, 2024 | Time Magazine

Supporters of PTI, the Most Popular Political Party of Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, rally against the national election commission’s decision to ban the party’s cricket bat symbol, in Karachi on Jan. 14, 2024. Fareed Khan—AP

It’s not been a great couple of years for Pakistan’s Imran Khan. Since his ouster as Prime Minister in an April 2022 no-confidence vote, the cricketer-turned-politician has been shot, hit with over 180 charges ranging from rioting to terrorism, and jailed in a fetid nine-by-11-foot cell following an Aug. 5 corruption conviction for allegedly selling state gifts. As Pakistan approaches fresh elections on Feb. 8, the 71-year-old’s chances of a comeback appear gossamer thin, despite retaining broad public support.

Pakistan’s military kingmakers are using every trick at their disposal to sideline the nation’s most popular politician and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Over recent months, thousands of PTI workers have been arrested, dozens of party leaders resigned following lengthy interrogations, Khan’s name was banned from mainstream media, and constituency boundary lines were redrawn to allegedly benefit his opponents. Khan’s own nomination papers have also been rejected.

“Elections are being held but I’ve got serious doubts whether real democracy or democratic principles are being followed,” says Samina Yasmeen, director of the Centre for Muslim States and Societies at the University of Western Australia.

And now Khan won’t even have his cricket bat.

On Monday, Khan’s PTI party was banned from using its iconic cricket bat logo on ballot papers, significantly hampering its chances amongst an electorate which is up to 40% illiterate. Most crucially, it effectively bans the PTI as a party and means its candidates will likely have to stand as independents, who will reportedly use a range of symbols ranging from a rollercoaster to a goat. “The election symbol is an integral component of fair elections,” Raoof Hasan, PTI’s principal spokesman and a former special assistant to Khan, tells TIME. “It’s rendering the party toothless.”

Pakistani lawmakers are constitutionally obliged to vote along party lines for certain key matters, including the leader of the house and financial legislation. But if PTI-backed candidates are officially independents, they are under no such constraints, making it much easier for the opposition to cobble together a coalition by targeting individuals with inducements. Additionally, PTI will be ineligible to receive its rightful proportion of the 200-odd parliamentary “reserved seats” for women and minorities that are allocated according to a party’s proportion of the overall vote, which would instead be divvied out to the other registered parties.

Imran Khan Waves a Cricket Bat, the Election Symbol of His Pakistan’s Most Popular PTI Party, during a rally in Faisalabad on May 5, 2013. Daniel Berehulak—Getty Images

Then again, even registering as independents has not been easy for the PTI. Each candidate must file their nomination in the constituency where they intend to stand, but PTI’s candidates frequently find their nomination papers snatched from their hands by shadowy security personnel. To avoid this, the PTI has taken to dispatching several candidates with nomination papers in the hope that one might break through the security cordon.

But even if one does manage to submit papers, each candidate requires a proposer and seconder to attend the nomination in person. On many occasions, a PTI candidate has presented his papers only to find either or both has abruptly been “kidnapped,” says Hasan, meaning that an alleged 90% of its candidates’ nomination papers have been rejected. “This is massive pre-poll rigging.”

The hurdles facing Khan and PTI stand in stark contrast to the lot dealt to Nawaz Sharif, three-time former Prime Minister, who was most recently ousted for corruption in 2017 and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In 2018, Sharif traveled to London on bail for medical treatment but absconded and remained a fugitive in exile. But on Oct. 21, an apparently healthy Sharif returned to Pakistan, where his corruption conviction was swiftly quashed and last week his lifetime ban from politics also overturned. On Monday, Sharif, 74, launched his campaign to return as Prime Minister for a fourth time—much to the chagrin of disenfranchised PTI supporters.

“The temperature is going to rise in the next few weeks when candidates step out to do rallies,” Khan’s sister, Aleema, tells TIME. “There’s going to be anger on the streets.”

It’s no secret that Pakistan’s military kingmakers have thrown their support behind Sharif, which ultimately means he’s a shoo-in to return to power. But Khan’s enduring popularity means more heavy-handed tactics will be required. Despite all PTI’s headwinds, and extremely patchy governance record while in power, a Gallup opinion poll from December shows the imprisoned Khan’s approval ratings stand at 57%, compared to 52% for Sharif. PTI remains confident that they will win if allowed to compete in a fair fight.

“People, especially at the grassroot level, are very pro-Imran Khan,” says Yasmeen. “Even if he tells them to vote for a piece of furniture, it will be elected.”

Corrupt to His Core, Thief, Looter, Traitor, Money Launderer, Morally Bankrupted Boak Bollocks and Pakistan Army’s Production Pakistan's Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addresses his supporters in Lahore on Oct. 21, 2023. Aamir Qureshi—AFP/Getty Images

A big question is why the international community has been so muted in the face of such brazen irregularities—especially the U.S., which under the Joe Biden administration claims to have made democracy promotion a key foreign policy priority. The stakes are high; nuclear-armed Pakistan is drowning in $140 billion of external debt, while ordinary people are battling with Asia’s highest inflation, with food prices rising 38.5% year-on-year.

The truth is that Khan has few friends in the West after prioritizing relations with Russia and China. “From a Washington perspective, anyone would be better than Khan,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

Sharif, by contrast, is perceived as business-friendly and pro-America. Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington’s foreign policy priorities have shifted to China, Ukraine, and now Gaza. Yet the importance of a trusted partner in Islamabad was made plain this week following an Iranian airstrike on alleged Sunni militants in Pakistan territory that killed at least two children and threatens a further escalation of the violence already roiling the Middle East.

American priorities in Pakistan are keeping a lid on terrorism and stabilizing relations with arch-nemesis India—and Sharif has a better record on both. However, these priorities aren’t necessarily shared by Pakistan’s military overlords, who may be backing Sharif today but have engineered his ouster thrice in the past—once via a coup d’état. There remains “a lot of bad blood between Nawaz and the military,” says Kugelman, “even if he were to become the next Prime Minister, civil-military relations could take the same turn for the worse.”

After all, no Pakistan Prime Minister has ever completed a full term—and if Sharif gets back in, few would bet on him becoming the first at the fourth time of asking. It may be part of the reason why Khan has adopted a stoic disposition despite the deprivations of his prison cell. “He is cold in jail but quite happy,” says Aleema Khan. “He’s read so many books, maybe two to three every day, and he’s very content to have this retreat time—spiritually, mentally, and physically, he says he feels better.”

Perhaps content in the knowledge that, while February’s election may be beyond hope, in Pakistan you may be down, but you’re never truly out. And that’s all the more reason to keep fighting. “We shall be in the election,” says Hasan. “We’re not going to back off, we’re not going to walk away, we’re not going to forfeit even a single seat throughout the country.”

#Pakistan 🇵🇰 #Pakistan’s 🇵🇰 Sham Elections #Under the Guns of Corrupt Pakistan’s Army General #Imran Khan | PTI #Without Party’s Synbol Cricket Bat 🏏 #Corrupt Election Commission | Politicians | Judges #Popular Imran Khan & PTI

[mariacallous]

Pakistan is scheduled to hold elections on Feb. 8, the latest crucial date in the country’s democratic experiment. Some observers feared Islamabad’s election commission could postpone the vote due to worsening security conditions, but even as the elections go ahead, many analysts worry they may not be free or fair. Pakistan has a long history of political interference in democratic processes by its powerful military.

The upcoming elections offer little hope for near-term political stability. Pakistan, currently led by a caretaker government, faces myriad political, economic, and security threats. Popular opposition leader and former Prime Minister Imran Khan sits in prison, convicted on corruption and state secrets charges. On Feb. 8, the military establishment is betting on a leader it dethroned not too long ago: former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose brother Shehbaz led the most recent coalition government.

Because Pakistan’s civil-military relations tilt in favor of the army, politicians are incentivized to side with the generals to attain power. This dynamic has weakened the constitution, compromised the judiciary, and undermined democratic elections. The military no longer intervenes in politics via coup, but its leaders have invested in the political system. Pakistan has developed into a hybrid regime where elements of electoral democracy and military influence mingle. Next week’s vote will only mark the next chapter of hybrid rule.

In 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ousted Sharif as prime minister after his family was linked to offshore companies in the Panama Papers leak; he was later disqualified from holding public office. Sharif had also tried to assert civilian supremacy over the army, and there are strong claims that the army played a role in his ouster, as well as the election of Khan in 2018. As Khan suffered his own fall from grace, Sharif was allowed to return to Pakistan last year. The cases against him have been cleared, potentially enabling him to participate in the elections—hinting that the military may condone his return to the prime minister’s seat.

Many observers regard Khan’s rise to power in 2018 as the outcome of electoral engineering by the military establishment. For a time, Khan seemed to share a mutually beneficial relationship with the army. However, he made a series of missteps in policy areas dominated by the military. First, he endorsed an inexperienced official to become chief minister of Punjab province, which irked then-Pakistan Army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa. His disagreement with Bajwa in 2021 over a replacement for the director-general of Pakistan’s premier intelligence service further alarmed the army.

Khan had promised to create Naya Pakistan—a new Pakistan—and to carry out sweeping reforms, but he mostly failed to realize these promises during his almost four years in power. Growing economic volatility and the indifference of some of Pakistan’s closest allies toward the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government further undermined Khan’s leadership. In April 2022, the old guard led by the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) called a vote of no confidence against Khan. He was voted out and sentenced to three years in jail last August after a conviction for illegally selling state gifts. Khan alleges the military arranged his ouster.

Motivated by their own interests, Pakistan’s political elites have long been complicit in tolerating the military’s domination of the democratic system. But Pakistan’s political parties have also attempted to establish civilian supremacy and failed to sustain it. As prime minister in the 1990s, Sharif sought to exert his control over state institutions, including the military. Gen. Pervez Musharraf led a military coup against his government in 1999 and became president in 2001. A conflict between Pakistan and India in the hills of Kargil is widely seen as the reason for the coup, but such analysis ignores the role of Sharif’s quest for civilian supremacy.

Musharraf not only prolonged the first exile of Sharif and the self-exile of then-opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, which reshaped Pakistan’s political parties. Ultimately, rivals PML-N and the PPP grew closer, especially after the fallout between the judiciary and Musharraf over the latter’s decision to suspend Pakistan’s chief justice. In 2006, the PML-N and the PPP agreed on a Charter of Democracy, an unprecedented development that sought to limit the army’s role in politics. In 2008, the two parties briefly formed a coalition government to keep the army and its disciples away from politics.

Sharif’s PML-N won a simple majority in the 2013 elections, and Pakistan saw its first peaceful transfer of power. However, Sharif’s growing clout didn’t sit well with the military establishment. In 2014, the military helped Khan launch mass protests against the government; they were also supported and attended by prominent religious figures and clerics. However, Khan called off the four-month protest movement in the wake of a terrorist attack against Peshawar’s Army Public School that killed 149 people. “Pakistan cannot afford [our] opposition in these testing times,” he said at the time.

A deteriorating security situation also contributed to the end of Khan’s tenure in 2022. Following his removal, a coalition of traditional political parties led by PML-N took over, with Shehbaz Sharif as prime minister. It needed the army’s backing to succeed. Instead of working for democratic rights, the coalition government amended Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act to give vast powers to the army and intelligence agencies to conduct raids and arrest civilians. The Pakistan Army Act amendment of 2023 criminalized criticism of the military, especially from retired service members. Army Chief of Staff Asim Munir became a member of a new council aimed at garnering foreign investment and boosting economic growth.

The expanded powers that the Pakistani Army now possesses seem to classify the state as what scholar Ayesha Siddiqa calls a hybrid-martial law system, in which all real power lies with the military while a civilian government is relegated to the position of junior partner. It now appears the judiciary is also toeing the military establishment’s line, with the Islamabad High Court recently acquitting Sharif in a corruption case and ultimately enabling him to contest elections. Khan, in prison, still faces a host of charges. His supporters have not been allowed to hold political conventions or meetings ahead of the elections. Mass protests against Khan’s initial arrest last May seemed to spook the military establishment.

The military’s greater machinations have yet to play out. Interestingly, the PPP chairman, Bilawal Bhutto, has accused the establishment of favoring Sharif—raising questions about the strength of the party’s alliance with PML-N. Bhutto may be filling the political vacuum left by the sidelining of the PTI. Sindh province recently saw a reshuffling of senior bureaucrats seen as favoring the PPP. Meanwhile, the PTI has raised concerns about election officers appointed ahead of the vote and demanded the appointment of officials from the lower judiciary as supervisors for the polls.

PML-N appears to be forging alliances with its traditional partners such as Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan (Fazl), or JUI-F, which has significant political support in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In Baluchistan province, PML-N has managed to secure two dozen so-called electables, local leaders with strong support base. The new Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party—made up of disgruntled former PTI members—has announced a pre-election seat-sharing arrangement with PML-N. The PML-N also finalized a seat-sharing arrangement with the Pakistan Muslim League Quaid e Azam Group, itself formed by former PML-N members in 2002.

Even behind bars, Khan remains the most popular politician in Pakistan. If the military establishment secures an election outcome in its favor, the next coalition government will still struggle to maintain its power across Pakistan’s political institutions. Pakistan urgently needs consensus among its stakeholders about how to create a robust democracy; the easiest way to reach it would be through free and fair elections without military interference. Perhaps the political parties should come up with a new charter of democracy.

But until and unless politicians stop pursuing narrow interests, the military establishment will continue to pull the strings of any government in power in Pakistan.

[zvaigzdelasas]

The end of American involvement in Afghanistan and the change in leadership in Pakistan presents the United States with an opportunity to reset its long-troubled relationship with the world’s fifth most populous country. President Joe Biden should initiate a high-level dialogue with new Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, who will be in power for up to a year before the next election is held.[...]

The withdrawal of American and NATO forces from Afghanistan last August, a badly flawed operation, has essentially freed up American policy toward this important nuclear-armed Muslim country of 243 million people. Now Washington can engage with Islamabad without prioritizing Afghanistan issues at the expense of our broader interests in regional stability with India and China, encouraging development in South Asia, and supporting the strengthening of the elected democratic forces in Pakistan. America also has an interest in balancing somewhat the influence of China, Pakistan’s closest ally, on decisionmaking in Islamabad.

The Biden administration, and in particular the White House, has given Pakistan a relative cold shoulder to date — irked by the war in Afghanistan ending with a Taliban takeover and ostensibly with then-Prime Minister Imran Khan publicly criticizing the U.S. as it happened; more broadly, Pakistan has simply not been high on the priority list of an administration aiming to counter China via its relationships in the Indo-Pacific and now focused on Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Biden did not call Khan while he was prime minister. Last fall, we argued he should. Khan in turn declined to attend Biden’s Summit for Democracy. The White House should call Shahbaz Sharif. Sharif is a three-time former chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and most prosperous province, and brother of three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The Sharifs have been marred by corruption allegations, key to Imran Khan’s arguments against them, but they are also pragmatic men eager to develop Pakistan’s infrastructure and economy. (One of us, Bruce, has known them for over 30 years.)

On the other hand, Imran Khan is an ideologue. He relied on anti-American rhetoric both in his rise to power as well as in his recent fall, denouncing alleged American interference in Pakistani politics this spring first to try to stay in power and now to try to get back in charge. He has been an outspoken critic of American operations against al-Qaida and the Taliban. [...]

The Sharif government has a moderate military leadership to work with in the months ahead. Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa has openly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a marked shift from Khan’s posture of “neutrality” on the war. [...] With [khan's] reliance on a U.S. conspiracy narrative as his government was about to fall, he solidified that position. On the other hand, Bajwa has spoken publicly about improving relations with America, as has Shahbaz Sharif. They will have to walk a delicate balance in engaging with the United States given Khan’s U.S. conspiracy narrative, which the army and Sharif have rebuffed but which Khan’s supporters buy wholesale. [...]

The opportunity for the Biden administration for this engagement is not open ended. Shahbaz Sharif inherits a weak economy which is now his primary problem, and his runway is limited. Imran Khan, meanwhile, is determined to get back in power. His support is substantial; he has led huge rallies in Pakistan’s major cities, relying on demagoguery and anti-American rhetoric. He is trying to undermine the new government’s legitimacy by calling it an “imported government” and railing about the corruption cases against its members. His party has resigned from parliament. In the end, the prize for both the Sharifs and Khan is the next election. Pakistan’s politics is increasingly uncertain; it’s an urgent time to open a dialogue. [...]

In terms of what should be on the immediate agenda, [one] aspect [...] could be to explore avenues for strengthening the economic relationship in a way that uses Pakistan’s untapped economic potential (ultimately to both Pakistan and America’s benefit), for instance with Pakistan’s small but growing tech sector. An important effect is that this gives Pakistan something other than the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to look to in terms of investment; a stronger economy also loosens the military’s hold on the country. It’s a big opportunity to fundamentally alter U.S.-Pakistan relations.

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

A divided nation asks: What’s holding our country together? (AP) Elections are meant to resolve arguments. This one inflamed them. Weeks after the votes have been counted and the winners declared, many Americans remain angry, defiant and despairing. Millions now harbor new grievances borne of President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud. Many Democrats are saddened by results that revealed the opposition to be far more powerful than they imagined. And in both groups there are those grappling with larger, more disquieting realizations: The foundations of the American experiment have been shaken—by partisan rancor, disinformation, a president’s assault on democracy and a deadly coronavirus pandemic. “What is holding our country together?’” wonders Charisse Davis, a school board member in the Atlanta suburbs, where the election has not ended. A pair of Senate runoffs on Jan. 5 will decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.

US officials: Suspect in Nashville explosion died in blast (AP) The man believed to be responsible for the Christmas Day bombing that tore through downtown Nashville blew himself up in the explosion, and appears to have acted alone, federal officials said Sunday. Investigators used DNA and other evidence to link the man, identified as 63-year-old Anthony Quinn Warner, to the mysterious explosion but said they have not determined a motive. Officials have received hundreds of tips and leads, but have concluded that no one other than Warner is believed to have been involved in the early morning explosion that damaged dozens of buildings and injured three people. In publicly identifying the suspect and his fate, officials disclosed a major breakthrough in their investigation even as they acknowledged the lingering mystery behind the explosion, which took place on a holiday morning well before downtown streets were bustling with activity and was accompanied by a recorded announcement warning anyone nearby that a bomb would soon detonate.

Ex-Military Officers Criticize Spain’s Government (NYT) Earlier this month, 271 former members of Spain’s armed forces used the anniversary of the country’s Constitution to issue a manifesto criticizing the left-wing coalition government and warning that Spain’s unity was under threat. The manifesto was published shortly after chats were leaked to the Spanish news media in which retired air force officers described Gen. Francisco Franco, Spain’s former dictator, as “the irreplaceable one” and gave a thumbs up to the suggestion that left-wing Spaniards be shot. Some of the retired officers also sent letters to King Felipe VI attacking the government led by the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. Although the defense minister and the chief of the armed forces said the statements did not represent the views of the active military, the bold foray into politics by former officers prompted the government to take legal action and worried analysts in a country that was led by a military dictatorship until 1975.

Gibraltar’s border with Spain still in doubt after Brexit (AP) While corks may have popped in London and Brussels over the end to a four-year saga known as Brexit, there is one rocky speck of British soil still left in limbo. Gibraltar, a British colony jutting off the southern tip of Spain’s mainland, wasn’t included in the Brexit trade deal. The deadline for Gibraltar remains Jan. 1, when a transitionary period regulating the short frontier between Gibraltar and Spain expires. If no deal is reached, there are serious concerns that a hard border would cause disruption for the workers, tourists and major business connections across the two sides. More than 15,000 people live in Spain and work in Gibraltar, making up about 50% of Gibraltar’s labor force. The Rock was ceded to Britain in 1713, but Spain has never dropped its claim to sovereignty over it. For three centuries, the strategic outcrop of high terrain has given British navies command of the narrow seaway from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

France and Germany Retake Reins as Britain Leaves EU’s Economic Orbit (WSJ) Britain long played a special role within the European Union, as a nuclear power and permanent United Nations Security Council member that had Washington’s ear. It was also a budget hawk that insisted on keeping the bloc’s spending in check. Some EU officials worried that the U.K.’s exit from the bloc would weaken a union that had been under pressure since Britons voted in 2016 to depart. That vote confronted the EU with the risk of disintegration and strengthened the hand of euroskeptic movements from Italy to Hungary. Instead, as the U.K. prepares to leave the EU’s economic orbit Jan. 1, the EU has regained confidence, helped partly by a revived Franco-German partnership and encouraged by the anticipated arrival of the Biden administration in Washington. Meanwhile, Paris, now the bloc’s dominant foreign-policy actor, is driving debate on everything from relations with Washington and Moscow to expanding the EU’s military capabilities.

Pope formally strips Vatican secretariat of state of assets (AP) Pope Francis has formally stripped the Vatican secretariat of state of its financial assets and real estate holdings following its bungled management of hundreds of millions of euros in donations and investments that are now the subject of a corruption investigation. Francis moved against his own secretariat of state amid an 18-month investigation by Vatican prosecutors into the office’s 350-million-euro investment into a luxury residential building in London’s Chelsea neighborhood and other speculative funds. Prosecutors have accused several officials in the department of abusing their authority for their involvement in the deal, as well several Italian middlemen of allegedly fleecing the Vatican of tens of millions of euros in fees. The scandal has exposed the incompetence of the Vatican’s monsignors in managing money, since they signed away voting shares in the deal and agreed to pay exorbitant fees to Italians who were known in business circles for their shady dealings.

Each year 1,000 Pakistani girls forcibly converted to Islam (AP) Neha loved the hymns that filled her church with music. But she lost the chance to sing them last year when, at the age of 14, she was forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam and married to a 45-year-old man with children twice her age. Neha is one of nearly 1,000 girls from religious minorities who are forced to convert to Islam in Pakistan each year, largely to pave the way for marriages that are under the legal age and non-consensual. Human rights activists say the practice has accelerated during lockdowns against the coronavirus, when girls are out of school and more visible, bride traffickers are more active on the Internet and families are more in debt. While most of the converted girls are impoverished Hindus from southern Sindh province, two new cases involving Christians, including Neha’s, have roiled the country in recent months. The girls generally are kidnapped by complicit acquaintances and relatives or men looking for brides. Sometimes they are taken by powerful landlords as payment for outstanding debts by their farmhand parents, and police often look the other way. Once converted, the girls are quickly married off, often to older men or to their abductors, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Forced conversions thrive unchecked on a money-making web that involves Islamic clerics who solemnize the marriages, magistrates who legalize the unions and corrupt local police who aid the culprits by refusing to investigate or sabotaging investigations.

China jails citizen-journalist for four years over Wuhan virus reporting (Reuters) A Chinese court handed a four-year jail term on Monday to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak, on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said. Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicentre than the official narrative. Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been censored, and whistle-blowers such as doctors warned. State media have credited the country’s success in reining in the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

U.S. bolsters support for Taiwan and Tibet, angering China (Reuters) China expressed anger on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law measures to further bolster support for Taiwan and Tibet, which had been included in a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid and spending package. China has watched with growing alarm as the United States has stepped up its backing for Chinese-claimed Taiwan and its criticism of Beijing’s rule in remote Tibet, further straining a relationship under intense pressure over trade, human rights and other issues. The Taiwan Assurance Act of 2020 and Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2020 both contain language objectionable to China, including U.S. support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in United Nations bodies and regular arms sales. On Tibet, which China has ruled with an iron fist since 1950, the act says sanctions should be put on Chinese officials who interfere in the selection of the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama’s successor.

Indonesia bans foreign visitors for 2 weeks over new coronavirus variant (Reuters) International visitors will be barred from entering Indonesia for a two-week period to try to keep out a new potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus, its foreign minister Retno Marsudi said on Monday. The new regulation, effective Jan. 1, comes days after Indonesia banned travelers from Britain and tightened rules for those arriving from Europe and Australia to limit the spread of the new variant. The new regulation applies to all foreign visitors, except for high-level government officials or foreigners with residency permits, she said.

Saudi court jails women’s rights activist for more than five years (Reuters) A Saudi court on Monday sentenced prominent women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul to five years and eight months in prison, her family and media said, after her conviction in a trial that has drawn international condemnation. Hathloul, 31, has been held since 2018 following her arrest along with at least a dozen other women’s rights activists. United Nations human rights experts have called the charges “spurious” and along with leading rights groups and lawmakers in the United States and Europe have called for her release. Rights groups and her family say Hathloul was subjected to abuse, including electric shocks, waterboarding, flogging and sexual assault. Saudi authorities have denied the charges. Hathloul rose to prominence in 2013 when she began publicly campaigning for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia. The main charges against Hathloul, which carried up to a 20-year sentence, included: seeking to change the Saudi political system, calling for an end to male guardianship, attempting to apply for a U.N. job, attending digital privacy training, communicating with international rights groups and other Saudi activists. Hathloul was also charged with speaking to foreign diplomats and with international media about women’s rights in the kingdom.

‘I would never go back’: Horrors grow in Ethiopia’s conflict HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP)—One survivor arrived on broken legs, others on the run. In this fragile refugee community on the edge of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, those who have fled nearly two months of deadly fighting continue to bring new accounts of horror. At a simple clinic in Sudan, one doctor-turned-refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the wounds of war: Children injured in explosions. Gashes from axes and knives. Broken ribs from beatings. Feet scraped raw from days of hiking to safety. On a recent day, he treated the shattered legs of fellow refugee Guesh Tesla, a recent arrival. The 54-year-old carpenter came bearing news of some 250 young men abducted to an unknown fate from a single village, Adi Aser, into neighboring Eritrea by Eritrean forces. He said Ethiopian soldiers beat him and took him to the border town of Humera. There, he said, he was taken to a courthouse he said had been turned into a “slaughterhouse” by militia from the neighboring Amhara region. He said he heard the screams of men being killed, and managed to escape by crawling away at night. “I would never go back,” Guesh said. Such accounts remain impossible to verify as Tigray remains almost completely sealed off from the world.

#headlines #news

[theculturedmarxist]

The decade of socialist revolution begins

       3 January 2020  

The arrival of the New Year marks the beginning of a decade of intensifying class struggle and world socialist revolution.

In the future, when learned historians write about the upheavals of the Twenty-First Century, they will enumerate all the “obvious” signs that existed, as the 2020s began, of the revolutionary storm that was soon to sweep across the globe. The scholars—with a vast array of facts, documents, charts, web site and social media postings, and other forms of valuable digitalized information at their disposal—will describe the 2010s as a period characterized by an intractable economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.

They will note that by the beginning of the third decade of the century, history had arrived at precisely the situation foreseen theoretically by Karl Marx: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”

What, in fact, were the principal characteristics of the last ten years?

The institutionalization of unending military conflict and the growing threat of nuclear world war

There was not a single day during the last decade when the United States was not at war. Military operations not only continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. New interventions were undertaken in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine. Even as 2020 is just getting under way, the murder of Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani, ordered by President Donald Trump, threatens all-out war between the United States and Iran, with incalculable consequences. The involvement of an American president in yet another targeted killing, followed by bloodthirsty boasting, testifies to the far-advanced derangement of the entire ruling elite.

Moreover, the adoption of a new strategic doctrine in 2018 signaled a vast escalation in the military operations of the United States. In his announcement of the new strategy, then defense secretary James Mattis declared: “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” The new doctrine revealed the essential purpose of what had previously been called the “War on Terror:” the attempt to maintain the hegemonic position of American imperialism.

The United States is determined to maintain this position, whatever the financial costs and the consequences in terms of human life. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) states in its recently released Strategic Survey: “For its part, the US is not likely voluntarily, reluctantly or after some sort of battle, to pass any strategic baton to China.”

All the major imperialist powers escalated, during the past decade, their preparations for world war and nuclear conflict. The trillion-dollar military budget adopted in 2019 by the Trump administration, with the support of the Democratic Party, is a war budget. Germany, France, the UK, and all the imperialist countries are building up their armed forces. The targets of imperialism, including the ruling elites in Russia and China, alternate between threats of war and desperate efforts to forge some sort of agreement.

The institutions developed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent another global conflict are dysfunctional. The Strategic Survey writes:

The trends of 2018–19 have all confirmed the atomisation of international society. Neither ‘balance of power’ nor ‘international rules-based governance’ serve as ordering principles. International institutions have been marginalised. The diplomatic routine of meetings continues, yet the competing exertions of national efforts, too rarely coordinated with others, matter more—and most often they are erratic in both execution and consequence. 

The end of a “global rules-based order”—i.e., one dependent on the unchallengeable dominance of US imperialism—sets into motion a political logic that leads to war. As the Strategic Survey warns: “Law is made and sustained by politics. When law cannot settle disputes, they are shunted back to the political realm for resolution.” To understand the “realm” to which the IISS is referring, one must recall Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as politics by other means.

And what would a modern world war entail? The IISS calls attention to new plans for the use of nuclear weapons. “Meanwhile, the US and Russia are modernizing their arsenals and changing their doctrines in ways that facilitate their use, while the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir remains a potential flashpoint for the use of nuclear weapons.” The recklessness, bordering on insanity, that prevails among policy makers is indicated in the growing conviction that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is a feasible option. The IISS writes:

All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that a limited, regional nuclear exchange, under some circumstances, has severe global environmental effects. But under other circumstances, the effects could be minimal. [emphasis added] 

The movement toward a Third World War, which would threaten mankind with extinction, cannot be halted by humanitarian appeals. War arises out of the anarchy of capitalism and the obsolescence of the nation-state system. Therefore, it can be stopped only through the global struggle of the working class for socialism. 

The breakdown of democracy

The extreme aggravation of class tensions and the dynamic of imperialism are the real sources of the universal breakdown of democratic forms of rule. As Lenin wrote in the midst of World War I: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and intensification of antagonisms in this field.”

Lenin’s analysis is being substantiated in the turn of the ruling elites, during the past decade, toward authoritarian and fascistic methods of rule. The rise to power of such criminal and even psychopathic personalities as Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson in the UK is symptomatic of a systemic crisis of the entire capitalist system.

Seventy-five years after the collapse of the Third Reich, fascism is making a comeback in Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, which is a haven for neo-Nazis, emerged during the past decade as the main opposition party. Its rise was facilitated by the Grand Coalition government, a corrupt media, and reactionary academics, who whitewash with impunity the crimes of Hitler’s regime. Similar processes are at work throughout Europe, where the fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s—Petain in France, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary and Franco in Spain—are being remembered with nostalgia.

The decade saw the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence and the cultivation of Islamophobia and other forms of national chauvinism and racism. Concentration camps were constructed on the US border with Mexico to imprison refugees fleeing from Central and South America, and in Europe and North Africa as the frontline of the anti-immigrant policy of the EU.

There is no progressive tendency to be found within the capitalist parties. Even when confronted with a fascistic president, the Democratic Party refrains from opposition based on the defense of democratic rights. Employing the methods of a palace coup, the Democrats seek Trump’s impeachment only because he, in their view, has undermined the US campaign against Russia and the proxy war in Ukraine.

The attitude of the entire bourgeois political establishment to democratic rights is summed up in the horrific treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. With the support of both the Democrats and Republicans, Assange remains confined in Belmarsh prison in London, awaiting extradition to the US. Manning has been imprisoned for nearly a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury called to indict Assange on further charges.

The persecution of Assange and Manning is aimed at criminalizing the conduct of constitutionally-protected journalistic activity. It is part of a broader suppression of dissent that includes the campaign of internet censorship and the jailing of the Maruti-Suzuki workers in India and other class-war prisoners.

The preparations for war, involving massive expenditures and requiring the accumulation of unprecedented levels of debt, snuff the air out of democracy. In the final analysis, the costs of war must be imposed upon the working people of the world. The burdens will encounter resistance by a population already incensed by decades of sacrifice. The response of the ruling elites will be the intensification of their efforts to suppress every form of popular dissent.

The degradation of the environment

The last decade was marked by the continued and increasingly rapid destruction of the environment. Scientists have issued ever more dire warnings that without urgent and far-reaching action on a global scale, the effects of global warming will be devastating and irreversible. The deadly inferno engulfing Australia, as the year ended, is only the latest horrific consequence of climate change.

In November, 11,000 scientists signed a statement published in the journal BioScience warning that “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” It noted that over the course of four decades of global climate negotiations, “with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament…

The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity…. Especially worrisome, are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable. 

Earlier in the year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that 821 million people, who were already suffering from hunger, face starvation as agricultural regions are impacted by global warming. Hundreds of millions could lose access to fresh water, while many more will be affected by increasingly severe weather patterns: flooding, drought and hurricanes.

Climate change, and other manifestations of environmental degradation, are the product of a social and economic system that is incapable of organizing global production in a rational and scientific manner, on the basis of social need—including the need for a healthy environment—rather than the endless accumulation of personal wealth.

The aftermath of the 2008 crash and the crisis of capitalism

Underlying all other aspects of the social and political situation is the malignant growth of extreme social inequality—the inevitable and intended consequence of all the measures adopted by the ruling class following the economic and financial crisis of 2008.

Following the financial crash, which occurred on the eve of the 2010s, world governments and central banks opened the spigots. In the United States, the Bush and particularly the Obama administrations engineered the $700 billion bailout of the banks, followed by trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” measures—that is, the purchase by the Federal Reserve of the worthless assets and securities held by financial institutions.

Overnight, the federal deficit of the American government was doubled. The assets of the Federal Reserve rose from under $2 trillion in November 2008 to $4.5 trillion in October 2014, and the figure remains at more than $4 trillion today. With a new $60 billion a month asset purchase program, initiated in late 2019, the balance sheet is expected to surpass post-crash highs by the middle of this year.

This policy has continued under Trump, with his massive corporate tax cuts and demands for further reductions in interest rates. The New York Times noted, in a January 1 article (“A Simple Investment Strategy That Worked in 2019: Buy Almost Anything”) that the value of almost all investment assets jumped sharply over the past year. The Nasdaq rose by 35 percent, the S&P 500 by 29 percent, commodities by 16 percent, US corporate bonds by 15 percent, and US Treasuries by 7 percent. “It was a remarkable across-the-board rally of a scale not seen in nearly a decade. The cause? Mostly a head-spinning reversal by the Federal Reserve, which went from planning to raise interest rates to cutting them and pumping fresh money into the financial markets.”

All the major capitalist powers have pursued similar measures. The allocation of unlimited credit and money printing—and this, in the final analysis, is what quantitative easing is—intensified the underlying crisis. In trying to rescue themselves, the ruling elites enshrined parasitism and raised social inequality to a level unknown in modern history.

Benefiting from the limitless infusion of money into the market, the fortunes of the financial elite rose during the past decade to astronomical heights. The 500 richest individuals in the world (0.000006 percent of the global population) now have a collective net worth of $5.9 trillion, up $1.2 trillion over the past year alone. This increase is more than the GDP (that is, the total value of all goods and services produced) of all but 15 countries in the world. In the US, the 400 richest individuals have more wealth than the bottom 64 percent, and the top 0.1 percent of the population have a larger share than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression.

The social catastrophe confronting masses of workers and youth throughout the world is the direct product of the policies employed to guarantee the accumulation of wealth by the corporate and financial elite.

The decline in life expectancy among workers in the US, the mass unemployment of workers and particularly young people throughout the world, the devastating austerity measures imposed on Greece and other countries, the intensification of exploitation to boost the profits of corporations—all this is the consequence of the policy pursued by the ruling elites.

The growth of the international working class and the global class struggle

The objective conditions for socialist revolution emerge out of the global crisis. The approach of social revolution has already been foreshadowed in the mass demonstrations and strikes that swept across the globe in 2019: in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, France, Spain, Algeria, Britain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, India and Hong Kong. The United States, where the entire political structure is directed toward the suppression of class struggle, witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than forty years.

But the dominant and most revolutionary feature of the class struggle is its international character, rooted in the global character of modern-day capitalism. Moreover, the movement of the working class is a movement of the younger generation and, therefore, a movement that will shape the future.

Those under 30 now comprise over half the world’s population and over 65 percent of the population in the world’s fastest growing regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Each month in India, one million people turn 18. In the Middle East and North Africa, an estimated 27 million young people will enter the workforce in the next five years.

From 1980 to 2010, global industrial development added 1.2 billion people to the ranks of the working class, with hundreds of millions more in the decade since. Of this 1.2 billion, 900 million entered the working class in the developing world. Internationally, the percentage of the global labor force that can be classified as peasant declined from 44 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2018. Nearly one billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to join the working class in the coming decades. In China alone, 121 million people moved from “farm to factory” between 2000 and 2010, with millions more in the decade since.

It is not only Asia and Africa that have seen a growth in the working class population. In the advanced capitalist countries, large sections of those who would have previously considered themselves middle class have been proletarianized, while the wave of immigrants from Latin America to the United States and from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe has added millions to a highly diverse workforce.

From 2010 to 2019, the world’s urban population grew by one billion, creating a network of interconnected “megacities” that are both hives of economic productivity and social powder kegs, where inequality is a visible fact of daily life.

And these workers are connected with each other in a manner that is unprecedented in world history. The colossal advances in science, technology and communications, above all the rise of the internet and the proliferation of mobile devices, have allowed masses of people to bypass the fake news of the bourgeois media, which function as little more than mouthpieces for the state and intelligence agencies. More than half of the world’s population, 4.4 billion people, now have access to the internet. The average individual spends over two hours on social media each day, largely on handheld devices.

Workers and youth can now coordinate their protests and actions on a global scale, expressed in the international movement against climate change, the emergence of the “yellow vests” as a worldwide symbol of protest against inequality, and the solidarity of auto workers in the United States and Mexico.

These objective changes are producing major shifts in social consciousness on the central question of social inequality. The 2019 United Nations Human Development Report explains that in almost all countries, the percentage of people demanding greater equality increased from the 2000s to the 2010s by up to 50 percent. The report warned: “Surveys have revealed rising perceptions of inequality, rising preferences for greater equality and rising global inequality in subjective perceptions of well-being. All these trends should be bright red-flags.”

The role of revolutionary leadership

The growth of the working class and the emergence of class struggle on an international scale are the objective basis for revolution. However, the spontaneous struggles of workers and their instinctive striving for socialism are, by themselves, inadequate. The transformation of the class struggle into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of political leadership.

The past decade has provided a wealth of political experiences demonstrating, in the negative, the critical role of revolutionary leadership. The decade began with revolution, in the form of the monumental struggles of Egyptian workers and youth against the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and with the assistance of disorientation introduced by the petty-bourgeois organizations, the masses were channeled behind different factions of the ruling class, culminating in the reestablishment of direct military dictatorship under the butcher of Cairo, al-Sisi.

All the alternatives to Marxism, concocted by the representatives of the affluent middle class, have been discredited: The “apolitical” and neo-anarchist Occupy Wall Street movement in the US in 2011 was revealed to be a middle-class movement whose call for a “party of the 99 percent” sought to subordinate the interests of the working class to those of the top 10 percent.

New forms of “left populism” were promoted in Europe, including Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Syriza came to power in 2015 and for four years implemented the dictates of the banks. Podemos is now a governing party, in coalition with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which is committed to a right-wing, pro-austerity program. The “Five-Star Movement,” presented as an anti-establishment insurgency, ended up in political alliance with the Italian neo-fascists. Corbynism, which peddled the illusion of a revival of the Labour Party as an instrument of anti-capitalist struggle, proved in the end to be synonymous with political cowardice and prostration before the ruling class. Were Sanders to make his way to the White House, his administration would prove no less impotent.

In Latin America, the “left” bourgeois nationalism that was part of the “Pink Tide”—Lulaism in Brazil, the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia—has been shipwrecked by the crisis of world capitalism. Their own austerity and pro-corporate policies prepared the way for a sharp shift to the right, including the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the US-backed military coup against Morales in 2019.

The trade unions, which have long served as mechanisms for the suppression of the class struggle, have been exposed as agents of the corporations and the state. In the United States, the struggles of auto workers have been waged in conflict with the corrupt executives of the UAW, under indictment or investigation for taking bribes from the companies and stealing workers’ dues money. The UAW, however, is only the clearest expression of a universal process.

A vast political and social differentiation has taken place between the working class and an international tendency of politics, the pseudo-left, which is based on sections of the affluent upper middle class who purvey the politics of racial, gender and sexual identity. The politics of the upper middle class seeks access to and a redistribution of some of the wealth sloshing about within the top 1 percent. They wallow in their obsessive fixation on the individual, as a means of leveraging “identity” into positions of power and privilege, while ignoring the social interests of the vast majority.

The tasks of the International Committee of the Fourth International

#2010s #internationalism #socialism #wsws

[militant-holy-knight]

As names of the victims of jihad who died on September 11, 2001 were read out on Wednesday morning in New York, it occurred to me that a crucial aspect of remembering the tragedy was missing.

There was no mention of the evil that struck us that day and has continued to hit us wherever liberal secular democracy exists, be it on 7/7 in London or 26/11 in Mumbai, or for that matter Kabul, Bali, Madrid, Paris, Damascus, and right here in Ottawa and Toronto.

If aliens were to drop by to watch the ceremony, they would get the impression that we were not commemorating the anniversary of an attack, but some catastrophic natural disaster such as the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia or the 1775 Lisbon earthquake.

It seems that from the centre-right to the centre-left, no one in the West dares to utter the ideology that nurtures our enemies, let alone develop a determination to defeat them.

Some have tried to eradicate the malaria of jihadi terrorism by shooting down individual mosquitoes, but as anyone who has fought that disease knows, one can only defeat malaria by draining the swamps. Invasions of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan to eliminate Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Islamic State have all failed because the "war against terror" became a profitable venture for America's military-industrial complex.

Pakistan, the country that nurtured the mastermind of 9/11, Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, and hosted Al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, escaped all scrutiny as its wily diplomats ran circles of deceit around Western governments while corrupt jihadi generals profited immensely and still do. In the meantime, our allies in India and Afghanistan suffer as they are used as laboratories where dozens of jihadi groups practice holy war, which is then exported from Mindanao in The Philippines, to California on the Pacific and Nigeria and Somalia in between.

Canadian newspapers too had little to say on the 9/11 anniversary, notwithstanding our own recent skirmishes with jihadis. At times we have even rewarded them, then allowed 'former' jihadis to 'deradicalize' them. Both must be laughing at us.

I scoured the New York Times story on the 9/11 anniversary for words like 'Al Qaeda', 'Bin Laden', 'jihad', 'Taliban', 'Khaled Sheikh Muhammad' and even 'Arab' or 'Saudi,' but found no mention. It seemed the liberal media dares not to mention the enemy for fear it may be labelled 'racist' and 'Islamophobic'.

While the West is in disarray with Trump, Boris Johnson and Macron fulfilling the role of the Three Stooges on the world stage, Islamists keep up a barrage of propaganda positioning the Muslim community as victims of what they see as essentially hostile Western society.

Even as Canadians prepare to vote in the 2019 October elections, not a single political party has raised the issue of how it will tackle the rise of Islamist terrorism worldwide. Not one. There was a time when a prime minister had the courage to name 'Islamism' as a worldwide threat, but not his successor in Sussex Drive nor the man who leads his party.

And while they were reading the names in New York of the women and men who perished as victims of jihad on 9/11, no one in Canada cared for our Canadian brothers and sisters who died that day. As a courtesy to the voiceless, here are the names of the forgotten 27:

Michael Arczynski Garnet Bailey Ken Basnicki David Barkway Jane Beatty Cynthia Connolly Joseph Collison Frank Joseph Doyle Arron Dack Albert Elmarry Michael Egan Christine Egan Meredith Ewart Alexander Filipov Peter Feidelberg Ralph Gerhardt LeRoy Homer Mark Ludvigsen Stuart Lee Bernard Mascarenhas Colin McArthur Michael Pelletier Donald Robson Ruffino Santos Vladimir Tomasevic Chantal Vincelli Debbie Williams

Their blood is on the hands of those who engineered 9/11. Until they are defeated, we should not rest.

#news #terrorism

[snkbak-blog]

PAKISTAN: AN ALIEN STATE

Mankind has been fascinated by aliens since time immemorial. All civilizations have incorporated aliens existence in their beliefs, traditions and even cryptic. Pakistan being part of the Indus civilization, possess the same devotion albeit (in the present scientific age) it has retracted itself somewhere deep in their subconscious minds. The advent of Islam into the Indo-Pak subcontinent has changed the cognizance and perception about supernatural aliens to one of a divine connotation. Time and again the spirits of our forefathers have endeavored to remind of us this resourceful avenue but to no avail. Not that aliens are real and the Divine is fake, just for the testing this proposition, let us just delve into historical journey that Pakistan has had in the cosmos of space and time      

      Since its inception, Pakistan has never fired off in any direction; be it political, military, economic, social, religious or even individual. The rulers in the past, civil, military, bureaucrat and foreign (care-takers) have tried their best to sabotage and hinder the development of any political system in Pakistan. They have never let the people to mature enough to understand the benefits of either system of governance. The aliens here too have endeavored their best to ensure that no one is misled by the false earthly creeds propagated by the rulers. Time and again they entered the bodies of different leaders and led the country to a path of self destruction. The simple fact that progress is progress whether one attains through capitalism or godless communism was unbearable to the ego of the over watching aliens. They could not stand the fact that the people was progressing without their help. In spite of all this, the people have always managed to weather the storm and by some grace survive the cataleptic changes imposed on their minds. It’s not that either system of governance is bad or unworkable; it’s the simple fact that the alien overlords are not letting the people to abandon their beliefs in them. These aliens will never allow the country to mature enough to understand the benefits of democracy, be it Islamic, liberal, social or militaristic. They cannot simply let go of their serfs.

      The economy has always been in shackles. The debt burden is so heavy, that if it is translated into coins, literally half of Asia will be crushed under its weight. Inflation is so high that Mount Everest is a tiny mound of dirt in comparison .Plunder after plunder after plunder has become a normal criterion of success for the govts. As the analogy goes “A melon ripens after it sees other melons ripe”, so have the people taken clue to their rulers and are looting, stealing and cheating each other in ways only conceivable by alien mechanisms. One can milk the cow only so much. The cow has dried and it starting to pour out its blood. The money that is flowing around in the country whatever it is (worth in real terms) is simply not present anywhere either in gold or cyber currency. The writing on the currency notes that an equivalent amount of gold will be remunerated is over exaggerated. Except for air there is nothing left to remunerate it with. Here the benevolent alien overlords are ensuring that air is worth its volume in gold. Currency is being printed as if an infinite well of precious metals have been discovered. Everyone knows this as a facade and they are quiet about it since only the aliens have the technology to convert air into gold. And the people trust the aliens to come through when the need arises.

      On the religious front Pakistan is a religious state. Securalism has still not penetrated the society enough to make it a Dubai, Turkey, Malaysia or the like. There is no major divide as to the understanding and beliefs about the soul in life. The country as a whole embraces the Islamic belief of transcendence into the next world by living a pious and virtuous live (though practically 99.99% of the people can be classified as irreligious on a strict Islamic criterion). Why is this so? Darwinism, scientific advancement, the presence of billions and billions of stars beyond our milky way solar system. The cry for potential of alien life is exponentially high considering the size of the universe. Is it true that religion is the opium of the masses! Certainly most people hope against hope that all is a lie and a benevolent alien comes to rescue them from eternal damnation that awaits for atonement of the mortal sins committed throughout life. Not that anyone can fight the divine but still, no aliens have been proven to not exist in any religion either which automatically makes one ponder about the utility and essence of the alien force. Monkeys might after all become our ancestors. This idea, this hope, this longing, is all because of the alien beings that have instilled the thought of their omnipotence into human minds.

     The Pakistani aliens are all not that bad. They care about the well-being and health of the people. Consider this for a fact that science has made a machine out of humans in the developed countries. Pakistani’s are trying their best to imitate the automization of their lives in line with the western civilization. They have become machines and machines are devoid of emotion and thoughts. One machine does not care what is happening to and around the other machine. Height of Inhumanity! Still somehow sometimes in spite of all the materialistic nonsense, the humanity side wakes up and reminds one of his essence. How can a human be infallible? How does he dare dream to be on a level of an alien? This effort (to upgrade) has angered the alien overlords and they are not happy about the physical and structural changes that Pakistan has made from time to time. Stability is what makes progress and Pakistan has never witnessed even a single month of stability in its existence. Aliens have been and still are punishing all the rulers that have dreamt to take Pakistan in the path of western progress. (Except in the case of Asif Ali Zardari, who in some people’s opinion is the personification of the Nordic Lord of mischief Loki himself. By the way how can he be punished, if the aliens start a war among themselves, who will look after Pakistan).

        As for the present, Pakistan’s economy is in dire straits. The treasury does not possess enough money to pay one month’s salary to its employees, let alone pay interests on loans or bills of petroleum. The internal resource generating machinery is so outdated (ancient alien apparatus) and inefficient that it is generating negative income. Its maintenance cost more than its ability to generate revenue. Again, in this situation who is paying the bills? The Divine only helps those who help themselves. And Pakistan has lost its credit as to be eligible for free help: a long time ago.

    A political party that was never more than a popular 11 member sports team, has gained nearly 17 million votes in the 2018 election. The Principle on which it won the election was compromised the very next day. An unholy trophobios of the corrupt and pious led to the establishment of a govt that can be dismantled even by one alliance partner. The host of this symbiotic relationship will soon be consumed of its piety. All this in the name of necessity. Considering the timeframe (2 months) it is virtually impossible that the elections might have been rigged to beget such a result. Such precisions and calculations is beyond the minds of any avenue in the country. However for the first time one man; our former Prime Minister had the astute observation of seeing the aliens (Khilaee Mukhlook) in play even when everyone else was busy ridiculing his assumptions. In reality it did not matter whether he won the elections or not. No one was ready to give him another chance (not so the aliens). This time around he was raising a voice for the people of Pakistan and tried to challenge the alien beings. Pakistan belongs to the people and only to the people alone. But alas not even a single soul is realizing the gravity of the situation the country is plunging into.

[vvvveta]

The dark sides of US foreign policies

For too long, the US has been accused in the Middle East of playing role in support of repressive and corrupt monarchies, defending exploitative practices of oil manufacturing and multinational companies, promoting a secular and materialistic lifestyle, seeking prejudicial use of the United Nations Security Council, fortifying and bankrolling militaristic and expansionist agenda of Israel, tolerating destabilisation efforts against protests, challenging pro-western regimes and staging periodic military interventions.

It is not just Afghanistan that has painted the US in the dark shadows. A spectrum of failure defines the US penchant to build the world on its image. More often than not, its military deployment followed a diabolic pattern of killing, mayhem, and disorder. The popular revolts of 2011 and the protests of 2019 and 2020 have effectively changed the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, and Iraq but without altering the political and economic structures feeding on Islamic militancy and repressive and illiberal governance structure.

These accusations reverberated in the results of the recent Iraqi parliamentary elections.

“We never got the democracy we were promised, and were instead left with a grossly incompetent, highly corrupt and hyper-violent monster masquerading as a democracy and traumatising a generation,” commented Iraqi Middle East counterterrorism and security scholar Tallha Abdulrazaq.

Such is the level of trust in the electoral process that Abdulrazaq has voted for only once in his life in Iraq. That was in the first election held in 2005 after the 2003 US invasion. “I have not voted in another Iraqi election since,” said Abdulrazaq.

The situation in Afghanistan and Iraq has raised questions on the US policy in the Middle East. Now that the policy of military intervention has ceased to bear results, what policy options does the US have to remain relevant and influential in the Middle East?

To the former US National Security Council and State Department official, Martin Indyk, the US should pursue a policy that aims “to shape an American-supported regional order in which the United States is no longer the dominant player, even as it remains the most influential.” Mr Indyk further writes in an essay, “Across the region, people are crying out for accountable governments” but, he laments, “the United States cannot hope to meet those demands even if it cannot ignore them, either.” He further argues that in this subdued role, the US support for Sunni Muslims and Israel should continue as core policies.

A shift to this new policy probably began with Joe Biden’s coming into office focusing on Asia rather than the Middle East. As the US loosened its grip on the security of its regional partner, especially in the Pacific Gulf, it resulted in the lifting of the Saudi-UAE-Egyptian-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar. In a similar feat, the movement to recognise Israel was initiated to give the regional players space to make political decisions. Taking a cue from the reduced US dominance, even China and Russia have also sent a message that the Middle East needs to get its acts together.

The question, however, is: how does the US plan to align with the autocratic and illiberal democracies?

The life cycle of the US relationship with its allies hit a snag with its stop being beneficial to the former. The Pakistan-US relation has gone through the same pattern. Pakistan has been abandoned as soon as it stops being beneficial to the US. Rarely had the US left a country united and protected in its wake. Pakistan had to pay a hefty price in joining hands with it on the war against terrorism. The birth of TTP was in reaction to that alliance. The havoc that Pakistan faced from 2007 to 2014, culminating in the cold-blooded murder of innocent children at the Army Public School Peshawar, is the price we paid to expect that Afghanistan would be rescued from its misfortune of political debacle. However, after two decades of interference and presence, that country is deeper into malice than what it was on the eve of 9/11.

The situation in the Middle East is getting grim as people are anxiously waiting to break the jinx of lousy governance by any means. Mr Abdulrazaq has explained this aptly in his Al Jazeera op-ed. Pointing to the 600 Iraqi protesters killed by the security forces, he writes, “Protesters are adopting novel means of keeping their identities away from the prying eyes of security forces and powerful Shia militias. Unless they shoot down…internet-providing satellites, they will never be able to silence our hopes for democracy and accountability again. That is our dream.”

So far, there has been a minimal actual change in US behaviour. However, there is a window of opportunity in recognising the Taliban and giving them a chance to integrate into the international order after adjusting to the principles and ethos defined by the United Nations. It would be a real sign of a change of hearts and a breather to the Middle East embroiled in war forever.

[xtruss]

8 Flagrant Ways The U.S-Backed Corrupt Caretaker Government In Pakistan Is Subverting The Election! Pakistan’s Corrupt $$$ Military-Backed Caretaker Government Has Gone To Extreme Lengths To Undermine The Opposition Party’s (PTI) Shot At The Polls.

— Ryan Grim | February 7, 2024 | The Intercept

Pakistani residents walk under flags depicting candidates from different political parties ahead of the upcoming general election in Lahore, Pakistan, on Feb. 7, 2024. Photo: Rebecca Conway/Getty Images

As Pakistan Prepares to determine its next government in a general election on Thursday, concerns are intensifying about electoral irregularities. A growing body of evidence points to election manipulation and political interference by the Pakistani military.

Pakistan was supposed to go to polls last year. The country’s constitution has five-year terms for both the national and provincial assemblies as well as for the post of the prime minister. When the former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government was toppled in a parliamentary coup backed by the Pakistani military and the U.S. State Department in 2022, it was only in its fourth year.

Since then, the Pakistani military has ruled from the shadows, trying to delay the inevitable elections while at the same time trying to ensure that the massively popular Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, do not come back to power.

Inside Pakistan, the media is completely muzzled. Outside Pakistan, the upcoming elections are being called the “least credible in the country’s historyOpens in a new tab,” and “more like a coronationOpens in a new tab,” where the military is understood merely to be choosing a new civilian face for its rule. While the U.S. State Department has consistently said that it has not made a determinationOpens in a new tab about the fairness of Pakistani elections, the events leading up to the elections have not gone unnoticed in Congress.

“Threats to free and fair elections anywhere [are] concerning. In light of recent events in Pakistan and the upcoming election, let’s be clear: promoting stability, democracy, and human rights around the globe is paramount to maintaining our values worldwide,” posted Republican Rep. Nathaniel MoranOpens in a new tab on Twitter.

“There can’t be free and fair elections when one of the opposition parties has been criminalized,” posted Democratic Rep. Ilhan OmarOpens in a new tab, echoing Moran’s sentiments from across the political aisle.

The publicly visible instances of election rigging — visible, that is, to all but the Biden administration — are too numerous to articulate in a single article. What follows are the most egregious.

Banning the Leading Party’s Symbol

On a Pakistani ballot paper, each political party has an electoral symbol. Candidates in each of Pakistan’s hundreds of constituencies have their party symbols next to their names, a critical guide for the substantial portion of the electorate who can’t read. PTI candidates were stopped from using their unified electoral symbolOpens in a new tab — a cricket bat — by the court, based on a technicality no other party was subjected to. This means each PTI candidate is assigned a random symbol and has to run an individual campaign.

With the loss of its bat, PTI was converted from a formidable political party to a loose group of individuals with no legal affiliation overnight, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens who placed their trust in PTI as a political entity. The move has been severely criticized as a “huge blow to fundamental rightsOpens in a new tab” by the Pakistani legal fraternity and civil society.

The implications of this go even further. If, by some miracle, PTI candidates overcome all the obstacles and win a majority in the Parliament, the technically unaffiliated candidates would be missing key legal protections and could be vulnerable to bribes and coercion by the military.

Shutting Down the Internet 🛜

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is now chaired by a retired generalOpens in a new tab. The chair of the PTA has the ability to shut down the whole country’s internet or specific websites on a moment’s notice. He has shut down social media and the internet every timeOpens in a new tab Khan’s PTI held an election-related event Opens in a new tabonline in the past few months, affecting more than 100 million users.

The Pakistani media has already expressed concernsOpens in a new tab that the internet might be shut down on election day to discourage people from voting. Lending credibility to those concerns, a top minister on Tuesday hinted at the possibility of an internet shutdown on election day, alarming human rights organizations including Amnesty International and prompting them to write an open letter and put out a statementOpens in a new tab.

“Amnesty International, along with several other human rights organizations, call on Pakistani authorities to guarantee uninterrupted access to the internet and digital communication platforms for everyone across the country,” the statement read.

Banning and Jailing the Leading Candidate

The charges against ousted prime minister Khan range from incoherent to absurd. He was charged with “exposing state secrets” for publicly discussing the contents of the secret cable that The Intercept reported on last year. He was slapped with a seven-year sentence for what the Supreme Court said was an invalid marriage. And he got 14 years for supposedly keeping state gifts without filing the proper paperwork or compensating the state, though all evidence suggests that he did so.

Three major court decisions in quick succession just before the elections has been seen inside Pakistan as a message from the Pakistani military establishment. The message is intended not only for the voters, but also for the candidates, signaling the influence and control wielded by the military.

Hacking the Election Management System

Just two days ago, a local electoral official complained in a letter circulated to the Election Commission of Pakistan that key software used in managing elections was behaving oddly. In the letter, the official cites specific issues with the software and claims that data related to its staff was erased. “This weakness of [the] system has created many issues and also raises [a] question mark on the reliability and validity of the tool/software. This shows that either the [election management system] is [an] utter failure or there is a someone else [sic] that controls and manages the system behind the veil,” he wrote in the document leaked onlineOpens in a new tab.

The election management system was built by the National Database and Registration Authority, a government department that is usually headed by a civilian but since last year has been run by a generalOpens in a new tab in the military. NADRA is the primary custodian of all of Pakistan’s data — from population and demographic data to voter rolls — and is supposed to play a key role in conducting elections along with the Election Commission of Pakistan. As long as the Pakistani military has direct control of NADRA, it controls all the systems used to administer elections and transmit their results.

Secret Pakistan Document Undermines Espionage Case Against Imran Khan! The former prime minister is charged with compromising Pakistan’s secret communications, but a document leaked to The Intercept says that didn’t happen. Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, December 18 2023. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, during an interview in Lahore, Pakistan, on June 2, 2023. Photo: Betsy Joles/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Terrorist Violence

Last week, 10 PTI activists were killedOpens in a new tab in a bomb blast at an election rally in the Balochistan province. The same week, a PTI candidateOpens in a new tab and a senior leaderOpens in a new tab were shot dead in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in separate incidents. In Karachi, a PTI candidate’s car was shot at. According to a statement from the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, there have been “no less than 24 reported instances” this year in which armed groups have attacked political parties in Pakistan ahead of the elections.

At least one of these deadly attacks was claimed by ISKPOpens in a new tab, the Afghan chapter of the Islamic State, which has never specifically targeted the PTI in the past.

Police Raids

When the elections were announced, there were several reports that unknown people and masked government officials were snatching the nomination papersOpens in a new tab of PTI candidates as soon as they would go to file them, thereby preventing them from filing to run before the deadline. Of the candidates who did manage to file, those who were not arrested faced frequent police raids on their homes.

During one raid at a political candidate’s home, an American police officerOpens in a new tab who happened to be vacationing in Pakistan was also arrested. He was subsequently released following intervention by the U.S. Embassy. In another police raid on a political activist’s house, the activist’s father suffered a heart attackOpens in a new tab and died.

Virtually every notable PTI member’s house has been raided and ransackedOpens in a new tab. In addition, PTI rallies and meetings have also been violently shut downOpens in a new tab by the police and scores of workers have been arrested. In one constituency in northern Pakistan, there were reports of police shootingOpens in a new tab at a PTI rally. On Tuesday, the last day of campaigning, almost everyOpens in a new tab PTI rally was attacked by police. In a video that went viral on social media, a PTI candidate, Zartaj Gul Wazir, is seen sitting on the road, cryingOpens in a new tab, after a police attack on her rally. In other areas that have not been so violent, comical social media videosOpens in a new tab of police chasing PTI activists through the streets have emerged.

In PTI strongholds, there are even reports of police ticketing people in unusually high numbers and confiscating their identification cards, which won’t be returned until after the election, meaning that they will be unable to vote.

Abducting Candidates and Their Families

There are reports of PTI candidates being abducted by unknown men and returning home only after announcing their withdrawal from the race. Most notably, a female PTI candidate, Iffat Tahira Soomro, was abducted and forced to step downOpens in a new tab under duress. She was the second candidate in the constituency to step down. PTI has now pitched a third candidateOpens in a new tab for the same seat.

In another incident, a PTI candidate’s elderly father was picked up from his house to pressure him into leaving the party. After four days, the father died in police custodyOpens in a new tab.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights deplored these incidents in their statement on Tuesday. “We are disturbed by the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders of the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party and their supporters which has continued during the election period,” the statement read.

Voter Suppression

PTI has been counting on high voter turnout to counter the efforts to manipulate the elections. But by reducing the number of polling stations in key constituencies, the government is effectively suppressing votes in those areas.

There are polling stations that used to have a few thousand voters assigned to them but will now have tens of thousands of voters. One polling station in Lahore that used to have only 8,000 constituents has ballooned to 29,000Opens in a new tab, including thousands of young and first-time voters from all over Lahore. In some constituencies in Karachi, so many people have been assigned to each polling station that with a 50 percent turnout (roughly the total turnout for the last election), each voter will get only one minute and 13 secondsOpens in a new tab to vote.

Can PTI Still Win?

Despite the gloomy verdict, a sense of hope persists among many in Pakistan. Nothing illustrates this contradiction more than two women, Yasmin Rashid and Aliya Hamza Malik, who are contesting elections from jail. These two political prisoners, running their campaigns from incarceration and against all odds, have become symbolic figures representing resistance against military interference in Pakistani democracy.

“The Brazen Electoral Rigging, Persecution Of Political Leaders, And Sham Court Trials Have Substantially Increased The Stakes.”

“The election in Pakistan is going to be a referendum against the establishment – a local euphemism for Pakistan Army – and its associated partners,” says Hussain Nadim, an analyst and former policy specialist working with the Pakistani government. “This is why despite all efforts by the establishment otherwise, we can forecast a historic turnout in the elections. The brazen electoral rigging, persecution of political leaders, and sham court trials have substantially increased the stakes,” he added.

In the week leading up to the elections, Khan has been sentenced to a cumulativeOpens in a new tab 31 yearsOpens in a new tab in prison. His political party confronts the imminent risk of outright prohibition, with his motley crew of candidates on the run, evading authorities, attempting to canvass for votes clandestinelyOpens in a new tab (and even using Opens in a new tabartificial intelligence).

Yet, PTI has resisted calls to boycott the election. The goal, they say, is to win in such dramatic and runaway fashion that even all of the above can’t steal it.

#The Intercept #Ryan Grim #Pakistan’s Elections #Corrupt Pakistan’s $$$Army General #Corrupt to their Cores Politicians | Judges #Under Pressure from Pakistan’s $$$ Army Generals Illegal Caretaker Government #Imran Khan #PTI’s Independent Candidates

[mariacallous]

Pakistan’s ongoing political crisis has reached a crescendo this month with former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s arrest and its fallout. The contours of the conflict are clear: it is Khan versus Pakistan’s military establishment. And the gloves are off.

Khan was arrested on May 9 from the premises of the Islamabad High Court, whisked away by dozens of paramilitary troops in riot gear, ostensibly for a corruption case. But the manner and timing of his arrest — coming just after he had doubled down on his allegations that a senior intelligence official was responsible for an assassination attempt against him last November — indicated that the arrest was more about the confrontation between Khan and Pakistan’s military which began last spring with his ouster in a vote of no-confidence.

The arrest set off protests on the same day across Pakistan, some of which turned violent and involved vandalism against military installations. In unprecedented scenes, protesters attacked the gate of the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the corps commander’s house in Lahore, and other buildings, including the Radio Pakistan offices in Peshawar. At least eight people died in clashes with the police. The country’s telecommunications authority shut off access to mobile internet services and social media for several days. In response to the protests, police have arrested thousands of Khan’s party workers, reportedly harassing their families in the process; many of them are yet to be produced in court. They also arrested senior leaders of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and key members of his former cabinet: his former foreign minister, finance minister, human rights minister, and information minister.

On May 11, Pakistan’s Supreme Court deemed Khan’s arrest from the premises of a court unlawful, and the Islamabad High Court granted him bail the following day. As he was released, he pointed a finger at one man: Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir.

A fight to the finish

Khan’s confrontation with the military has now devolved into an existential, zero-sum fight between the country’s most popular politician and its most powerful institution. Khan, once the military’s favored politician, has since last year stoked popular resentment against the institution, which he blames for his ouster. The attacks on military buildings after Khan’s arrest damaged the institution’s veneer of invincibility. The military — long Pakistan’s sacred cow, its one institution deemed untouchable — has not taken kindly to Khan’s dissent. It has responded forcefully to the protests on May 9 — which it has called a “black day” — saying that violent protesters will be tried in military courts. Trying civilians in army courts would violate Pakistan’s obligations under international human rights law. But Pakistan’s National Security Council backed the military’s decision and its civilian government has lined up behind it, dealing a blow to the constitution and rule of law in the country. This week, an anti-terrorism court in Lahore allowed the handing over of 16 civilians to the military for trials.

In some ways, Khan’s popular support had acted as a buffer over the last year against the military’s assertiveness. But after the protests on May 9, the military establishment has reverted to its usual playbook for political leaders and parties that fall out of line in Pakistan. In this, it is using the pliant coalition government as its partner, as it has in the past with the government of the day. For its part, the government, in its eagerness to comply with the establishment, has been all too willing to forget the lessons of the past, when it itself had been at the receiving end of the establishment’s ire.

Senior leaders of the PTI, part of Khan’s inner circle, have been rearrested repeatedly even after being granted bail over the last two weeks. This week, they buckled under mounting pressure and have been leaving the party, one after the other. Shireen Mazari, the former human rights minister, who had been arrested five times over two weeks, was the first in the top ranks to quit this week. Fawad Chaudhry, the former information minister, followed suit. Party stalwart and close Khan aide Asad Umar announced that he was stepping down from his leadership positions within the party immediately following his release from jail. Among the PTI’s senior-most leaders, only former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, still incarcerated, remains with the party. Other prominent party members have also resigned. The government says it is considering a ban on the PTI.

Pressuring politicians to quit or switch parties has long been part of the Pakistani establishment’s playbook, which allows it to maintain an iron grip on politics. Khan had been the beneficiary of such maneuvering prior to the 2018 election. But the ferocity of the pressure and the speed of the defections this time around have taken even seasoned observers of Pakistan’s politics and its civil-military machinations by surprise.

Meanwhile, the coalition government has taken on a separate confrontation with the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, alleging that Pakistan’s judiciary is biased in favor of Khan. Parts of the judiciary are now pitted against one other.

At the same time, the economy is in dire straits. The country has been perilously close to default for months, and inflation reached a record 36.4% last month. The last tranche of an International Monetary Fund bailout program, set to expire in June, has been on hold for months as the fund waits for Pakistan to secure loans from the Gulf and China. The failure of the coalition government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to deal with the economic crisis has left it deeply unpopular.

No institution in the country seems capable — or willing — to take it out of its current mess.

What’s at stake

General elections are due in Pakistan by October. It is far from clear whether they will happen on time or whether they will be free and fair. It is apparent that the state wants Khan sidelined before then. After his ouster last year, Khan had rallied massive amounts of popular support — and demonstrated it in lively rallies around the country and in by-elections held in July and in October. His party, which had been in power in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, dissolved those two provincial assemblies this January in a bid to force early elections. But that gamble backfired: the state has refused to hold those provincial elections within 90 days as constitutionally mandated and has defied a Supreme Court order saying the Punjab elections needed to be held by May 14.

For a while, it seemed that in the usual conflict between the establishment and an ousted political leader, this time could be different. Khan had momentum because of his rallies, the unique demographics of his popular support (urban, young, middle class), his party’s savvy use of social media, and the extent to which he took the military head-on. But given the frontal assault on Khan and the PTI at this point, all of that may not be enough to substantially change outcomes for him. If history is any guide, it’s not looking good for Khan, his party, or Pakistan’s democracy. Quashing the PTI will leave behind a genuine and frustrated support base for Khan — one completely disillusioned with Pakistan’s establishment parties — that has no one to support.

What the United States can do

The Biden administration, which has limited its engagement with Pakistan over the last two years, should stand in favor of democracy in Pakistan, the rule of law, and the supremacy of its constitution, all of which are currently under threat — and not with the United States’ usual and favored partner in Pakistan, its military. This means the administration should explicitly speak up against violations of the rule of law and the country’s constitution — especially against the idea that civilians may be tried in military courts in the country — and in support of free, fair, and on-time elections in Pakistan this year. This is the only way forward for the country.

[opedguy]

U.S. Opens Doors to Afghan Refugees

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Aug. 18, 2021.--Watching the panic-and-chaos sweep Afghanistan with the Taliban in power again, former Trump administration officials warned about abusing the Special Immigrant Visa [SIV] visa program, originally designed for immigrants that worked with U.S. officials in a some constructive capacity, like translators, guides, drivers, cooks and others.  In a letter signed by Russell Voight, former official with Office of Management and Budget [OMB], Ken Cuccinell, deputy chief of Homeland Security and Rachel Semmel, former spokesman at OMD, they all warned of allowing unvetted immigrants into the United States citing a terrorism risk.  None of the former Trump staffers had anything to do with the vetting process for Mideast refugees, something that irked Mideast officials and others when Trump banned immigration into the U.S.  Democrats and the press used that to highlight Trump’s xenophobia.      

       Whatever the original intent of the SIV visa program, it’s perfectly suited for the extraordinary situation in Afghanistan, where in a matter of days the Taliban seized Afghanistan and encircled Kabul, the capital city.  President Joe Biden, 78, said recently that the Afghan Army, supported, armed and funded by the U.S., would stave off the Taliban for months if not indefinitely only a few days ago.  Biden said he would only level with the American public, leaving the only conclusion that he was clueless of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan.  When 72-year-old Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country Aug. 16 for Doha, Qatar with $169 million in his luggage, it speaks volumes about the corrupt U.S.-puppet regimes.  Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, 90, said today the U.S. spent way too much time propping up puppet regimes for the last 20 years.   

          Anyone with any familiarity with the Afghan regime knew that the Taliban controlled most of the country, with the U.S.-backed regime holding on to Kabul.  When Sept. 11 blindsided the U.S. government in the most horrific attack on the homeland in U.S. history, 75-uear-old President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom Oct. 7, 2001.  Bush’s mission stated at the time was to neutralize al-Qaeda terrorist founder and mastermind Osama bin Laden.  By the time the Pentagon toppled the Taliban Nov. 14, 2001 Bin Laden was no where to be found.  It’s doubtful that the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar knew Bin Laden’s whereabouts, since the slippery terrorist never slept at the time in the same place.  Yet Bush felt inclined to topple the Taliban, a far more dramatic event than sending U.S. Special Forces on a secret mission to find and neutralize Bin Laden.        

     Bush promised at the time that he would not use the military for nation-building, something that he proceeded to do while in office.  Bush thought, like he did in invading Iraq March 20m 2003, that he could democratize the Middle East, something that backfired, especially in Afghanistan.  Gorbachev said it right that the U.S. stayed way too long in Afghanistan, over 10 years after Bin Laden’s May 2, 2011 death at the hands of U.S. Navy Seal Team 6.  U.S. soldiers serving multiple tours in Afghanistan found themselves in a hopeless situation, knowing the Taliban was under every bush, ready to booby trap every road, hill top or valley where U.S. troops traveled   Former NFL player Pat Tillman lost his life to “friendly fire” in Afghanistan April 24, 2004, symbolizing the horrifically stressful atmosphere, maiming U.S. soldiers, culminating in the deadly friendly-fire incident.    

         Tillman’s death shocked the nation because it symbolized a kind of mission impossible for U.S. troops unlucky enough to end up in Afghanistan.  Yet successive generations of U.S. soldiers continued their tours of duty in Afghanistan, without any real mission because Bin Laden was long gone, in hiding as it turned out in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  When 75-year-old President Donald Trump negotiated an end to the Afghan War with the Taliban Feb. 29, 2020, it made sense to just about everyone.  Biden blamed Trump’s agreement with the Taliban for pushing him to end the Afghan War, though pushing back the withdrawal from May 1, 2021 to Sept. 1.  But Biden’s withdrawal problem had nothing to do with Trump but poor planning and miscalculation, not realizing that to pull off the evacuation from Kabul safely, in an orderly way, he needed a strong U.S. military presence.    

         Former Trump officials raising concerns about granting SIV visa to Afghans seeking to immigrate to avoid life under the Taliban is grossly exaggerated, worried about possible terrorist infiltration.  Taliban fighters are not associated with global terrorism, not likely to infiltrate the U.S. homeland with the purpose of committing terrorist acts.  With the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, some terrorism experts worry about the Taliban’s support of al-Qaeada or what’s left of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS].  But like the brutal Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, he had no overseas operation designed to attack Western democracies.  Terrorism only flooded Iraq when Bush toppled Saddam April 10, 2003.  Because the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years, it’s only right to allow the SIV visa program to help relocate any Afghan looking to immigrate to escape the Taliban. 

About the Author   

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.