The Indian government’s response to Trump’s tariff war has been, at best, muted. A recent meeting between the U.S. President and the Indian Prime Minister epitomised this submissiveness. Even as the U.S. government was forcibly deporting Indian nationals; shackled, blindfolded, and transported in military aircraft in a manner starkly violative of human dignity. The Indian government chose denial over protest, publicly insisting that the deportees had not been ill-treated. Further, when Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil-language magazine, published a satirical cartoon critiquing the government’s silence on these humiliations, it was summarily censored under India’s draconian information technology legislation.

Such episodes highlight a broader incapacity to mount even a symbolic defence of Indian sovereignty when affronts originate from hegemonic global powers like the United States. This inability to respond meaningfully to external provocations, whether on trade, diplomacy, or the treatment of Indian citizens, raises important questions about the ideological and structural orientation of the Indian state.

Two interrelated factors underlie this posture of passivity. First, India’s ruling classes and their political apparatus remain deeply beholden to international finance capital, which is largely centred in the United States. Second, this dependency is compounded by a fundamental misreading of contemporary global political economy. These material realities are expressed ideologically through two distinct, yet convergent, wings of India’s neoliberal project: the neo-fascists and the cosmopolitan neoliberals. While the former deploy a pseudo-nationalist rhetoric and the latter a pseudo-internationalist one, both ultimately converge in their reluctance to challenge U.S. imperialist hegemony. Their divergence lies only in the rhetorical justifications they offer for this subservience. These arguments merit closer scrutiny.

One strand of cosmopolitan neoliberal thought argues, somewhat brazenly, that Trump’s tariff war offers India an opportunity to unilaterally reduce its own tariffs. They claim that such a reduction would boost domestic competition and thereby improve economic efficiency. However, this argument is logically inconsistent: if lowering tariffs unconditionally leads to better outcomes, why does the U.S., the world’s most powerful economy, choose to increase them?

Other cosmopolitan neoliberals argue that India is a small open economy while the US is a large open economy, implying that world prices are given as far as the Indian economy is concerned while the US is capable of at least partially influencing world prices. Therefore, it would be unwise for India to engage in retaliation vis-à-vis the the imposition of tariffs by the US. On the face of it, this argument seems somewhat logical and therefore let us examine this further. While it is true that the Indian economy is smaller than the U.S. economy in terms of share of world income, for a number of commodities that India does import and export, the respective share of India’s imports and exports in the total world trade is non-negligible. Therefore, the ability of India to partially determine the pricing of its imports and exports can be an element in its trade policy including tariff retaliation.

Moreover, the very structure of Trump’s tariff war, which involves differential tariffs on different countries, is a tactic designed to try and prevent coordinated opposition to Trump’s trade policy. Therefore, it would be relevant for India to work in multilateral forums such as the BRICS to prepare strong and coordinated responses to Trump’s tariff war. However, whenever there emerges a debate around working in multilateral forums such as BRICS to counter Trump’s tariff force, both cosmopolitan neoliberals as well as the neo-fascists might immediately argue that BRICS is dominated by China and that the interests of China and India diverge. Therefore, joint action against US hegemonic actions such as Trump’s trade war is not possible. However, this is a self-defeating argument and actually amounts to creating non-tariff barriers in the trade between China and India which weakens India’s bargaining power with respect to US imperialist hegemony.

For example, cosmopolitan neoliberals as well as neo-fascists often claim that software semiconductor chips made in China could be hacked by the Chinese government and therefore would be inappropriate for use in the Indian economy.  Let us assume for the sake of argument that this claim is true. Is there any reason to claim, on the contrary, that semiconductor chips that are designed or produced using US technology cannot be or will not be hacked by the US government? After Edward Snowden’s revelations even those working outside governments know the facts about global surveillance by the US government. Under these circumstances, a prudent option available to India would to diversify its chip demand between two or more sources so that no one foreign government can exercise undue leverage in matters of security vis-à-vis India. While this would be the short-run course that would be appropriate in the case of countries like India, over the long run, efforts should be made to develop an indigenous semiconductor industry.

Another common claim by both ideological segments of the Indian neoliberal project is that U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods provide Indian industry with a relative advantage, potentially encouraging multinational corporations to shift production from China to India. However, this argument too is completely disconnected from the concrete situation concerning global production networks. China exercises a leading position in almost all reaches of the technological ladder that pertains to global production networks due to its advantages in infrastructure, skilled labour with respect to wages, domestic demand, the role of the public sector, state support to innovation, and industrial policy (which involves among other things a euthanising of finance capital and the political neutering of enterprise capital). Most of these conditions are incompatible with contemporary Indian political economy and therefore cannot be replicated here without relevant political changes. Therefore, multinational corporations are unlikely to significantly relocate production capacity to India due to Trump’s trade war.

Moreover, any process of industrialisation in any country of the world would require for its continuance some Chinese inputs and/or some access to Chinese markets to be sustainable. Under these circumstances, the question before any country, including India, is not whether to engage or disengage from China, but how best to engage with China. The Economic Survey of 2023-2024 had pointed out that India should explore the option of involving itself in global production networks centered in China. However, progress in this respect has been slow and expectedly subject to counter-pressures from cosmopolitan neoliberals as well as sections of the neo-fascist dispensation in India.

Vietnam offers a valuable lesson in strategic diplomacy. Its ability to maintain productive relationships with multiple great powers, without being beholden to any, demonstrates an autonomous balancing strategy. For India, the path to greater sovereignty lies in rejecting the binary of alignment with either the U.S. or China, and instead adopting a policy framework driven by authentic national interests (which is centred around the working people). In order to understand this proposition, let us examine the actual leverage that foreign countries exercise over India.

The fundamental leverage that U.S. monopoly capital exercises over India is through the hegemony of international finance capital that is centered in the U.S. Since India does not have effective capital controls, this allows U.S. monopoly capital to exercise effective power over Indian policymaking. One exception to this trend was when the Biden administration tried to pressure Indian government to cut relations with Russia. The Indian government could not accede to this US demand because the Chinese-Russian strategic concord that would have emerged may have been directed against India. This strategic concord could not have been counterbalanced by the strategic proximity that may have emerged between India and the USA. But in most other matters, the U.S. monopoly capital has been able to influence, to a very significant extent, the contours of policymaking in India. Consider, for instance the examples of India’s relations with Iran, with Venezuela, on the question of the conflict in Palestine, and so on. The contrast with US attempts to exercise similar leverage over China or Russia is readily evident.

In the absence of effective capital controls, international finance capital, primarily centred in the United States, continues to serve as a conduit through which U.S. monopoly capital exercises considerable influence over Indian economic policymaking. This structural dependence finds its ideological expression in the distinct yet convergent narratives of cosmopolitan neoliberals and the neo-fascist dispensation.

On the one hand, neo-fascists have intensified a differential squeeze on the socially oppressed (such as Indian Muslims) under the guise of cultural nationalism and security. This project is part of a broader attempt to erase what remains of India’s anti-imperialist legacy from the freedom struggle. On the other hand, cosmopolitan neoliberals, while cloaked in liberal internationalism, contribute to the same erasure by sanitising colonial history and glorifying imperialist globalisation. Though their methods differ, both ideological strands ultimately function to sustain the hegemony of metropolitan capital.

At the core of any meaningful anti-imperialist position lies the understanding that broad-based economic progress in the Global South is not possible without directly confronting the hegemony of metropolitan capital. The recent efforts of U.S. monopoly capital and its state apparatus to drive a wedge between China and Russia is a tactic aimed at forestalling the emergence of a multipolar economic order indicating the waning strength of U.S. imperialist dominance. Against this backdrop, restoring policy autonomy for India must begin with the imposition of robust capital controls on international finance. Once this critical step is taken, several policy options become viable to counter the effects of Trump’s tariff war:

One, India must reduce its excessive reliance on the U.S. market for specific commodity exports. While the U.S. may currently offer higher returns for certain export goods, this concentration increases India’s vulnerability to external leverage. A geographically diversified export strategy will enhance India’s bargaining position across all markets. Such a strategic reorientation, especially one that considers long-term national interest is best undertaken through initiatives involving the public sector, which operates with a longer policy horizon than private actors driven by short-term profitability.

Two, India should actively attract greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI), from both the U.S. and China, in carefully selected sectors and regions. These choices must be guided by a coherent industrial policy aimed at enabling India to appropriately ascend the technological ladder of global production networks while not compromising the objective of full employment. Simultaneously, this policy should aim to reduce regional disparities within India by dispersing industrial development beyond existing hubs.

Three, Resist Pressure to Reduce Import Tariffs, Especially in Agriculture and Key Inputs as succumbing to U.S. demands for reducing import tariffs, particularly on agricultural products would further pauperise India’s already vulnerable peasantry and agricultural labour force. A related argument advanced by cosmopolitan neoliberals claims that high-priced inputs supplied by large domestic firms disadvantage micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and that reducing import tariffs would level the playing field and boost MSME exports. However, such logic is deeply flawed. Lowering tariffs on critical inputs may indeed reduce costs for MSMEs in the short run, but it is likely to trigger an import surge that undermines domestic production, employment, profits, and investment in import-competing sectors.

In the current global environment, where export prospects are weakening this would have contractionary effects across the economy. Furthermore, once domestic competitors are displaced, foreign suppliers may increase input prices, thereby nullifying any temporary advantage gained by MSMEs. The structural disadvantage faced by Indian MSMEs in relation to monopoly capital cannot be addressed by import liberalisation. Instead, it demands active policy intervention that redistributes resources away from monopoly capital towards MSMEs. This may include public sector production of essential inputs at regulated prices to mitigate cost pressures faced by MSMEs.

Reviving the Anti-Imperialist Legacy

The ideological currents that dominate Indian policy discourse, be they cosmopolitan neoliberals or neo-fascists, seek to suppress the anti-imperialist ethos that once animated India’s freedom movement. The former sanitise colonial history; the latter attack marginalised communities within the country. Both ultimately serve the interests of metropolitan capital. Genuine anti-imperialism today must recognise that sustainable development in the Global South requires breaking free from the grip of metropolitan capital. The growing strategic anxieties of U.S. monopoly capital, exemplified by attempts to isolate China and Russia signal a waning imperialist order. For India, this moment demands bold and thoughtful policy shifts aimed at recovering national sovereignty, economic justice, and strategic autonomy.

Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. C Saratchand is Professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post Rethinking the Indian Response to Trump’s Tariff War appeared first on SabrangIndia.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.[1]

A military victory

This is a military and political victory for the Taliban. It is a military victory because the Taliban have won the war. For at least two years the Afghan government forces – the national army and the police – have been losing more people dead and wounded each month than they are recruiting. So those forces are shrinking.

Over the last ten years the Taliban have been taking control of more and more villages and some towns. In the last twelve days they have taken all the cities.

This was not a lightning advance through the cities and then on to Kabul. The people who took each city had long been in the vicinity, in the villages, waiting for the moment. Crucially, across the north the Taliban had been steadily recruiting Tajiks, Uzbeks and Arabs.

This is also a political victory for the Taliban. No guerilla insurgency on earth can win such victories without popular support.

But perhaps support is not the right word. It is more that Afghans have had to choose sides. And more of the Afghan people have chosen to side with the Taliban than have chosen the American occupiers. Not all of them, just more of them.

More Afghans have also chosen to side with the Taliban than with the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani. Again, not all of them, but more than support Ghani. And more Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban than with the old warlords. The defeat of Dostum in Sheberghan and Ismail Khan in Herat is stunning evidence of that.

The Taliban of 2001 were overwhelmingly Pushtuns, and their politics was Pushtun chauvinist. In 2021 Taliban fighters of many ethnicities have taken power in Uzbek and Tajik dominated areas.

The important exception is the Hazara dominated areas in the central mountains. We come back to this exception.

Of course, not all Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban. This is a war against foreign invaders, but it is also a civil war. Many have fought for the Americans, the government or the warlords. Many more have made compromises with both sides to survive. And many others were not sure which side to take and are waiting with different mixtures of fear and hope to see what will happen.

Because this is a military defeat for American power, calls for Biden to do this or that are simply silly. If American troops had remained in Afghanistan, they would have had to surrender or die. This would be a even worse humiliation for American power than the current debacle. Biden, like Trump before him, was out of options.

Why so many Afghans chose the Taliban

The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. Why?

The short answer is that the Taliban are the only important political organization fighting the American occupation, and most Afghans have come to hate that occupation.

It was not always thus. The US first sent bomber planes and a few troops to Afghanistan a month after 9/11. The US was supported by the forces of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of non-Pushtun warlords in the north of the country. But the soldiers and leaders of the Alliance were not actually prepared to fight alongside the Americans. Given the long history of Afghan resistance to foreign invasion, most recently to the Russian occupation from 1980 to 1987, that would just be too shameful.

On the other side, though, almost no one was prepared to fight to defend the Taliban government then in power. The troops of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban faced each other in a phony war. Then the US, the British and their foreign allies began to bomb.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services negotiated an end to the stalemate. The United States would be allowed to take power in Kabul and install a president of their choice. In return, the Taliban leaders and rank and file would be allowed to go home to their villages or into exile across the border in Pakistan.

This settlement was not widely publicized in the US and Europe at the time, for obvious reasons, but we reported on it, and it was widely understood in Afghanistan.

For best evidence for this negotiated settlement is what happened next. For two years there was no resistance to the American occupation. None, in any village. Many thousands of former Taliban remained in those villages.

This is an extraordinary fact. Think of the contrast with Iraq, where resistance was widespread from Day One of the occupation in 2003. Or think of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, met with the same wall of anger.

The reason was not simply that the Taliban were not fighting. It was that ordinary people, even in the Taliban heartland in the south, dared to hope that the American occupation would bring Afghanistan peace and develop the economy to end the terrible poverty.

Peace was crucial. By 2001 Afghans had been trapped in war for twenty-three years, first a civil war between communists and Islamists, then a war between Islamists and Soviet invaders, then a war between Islamist warlords, and then a war in the north of the country between Islamist warlords and the Taliban.

Twenty-three years of war meant death, maiming, exile and refugee camps, poverty, so many kinds of grief, and endless fear and anxiety. Perhaps the best book about what that felt like is Klaits and Gulmanadova Klaits, Love and War in Afghanistan (2005). People were desperate for peace. By 2001 even Taliban supporters felt a bad peace was better than a good war.

Also, the United States was fabulously rich. Afghans believed the occupation could lead to development that would rescue them from poverty.

Afghans waited. The US delivered war, not peace.

The US and UK military occupied bases throughout the villages and small towns of the Taliban heartland, the mainly Pushtun areas of the south and east. These units were never told of the informal settlement negotiated between the Americans and the Taliban. They could not be told, because that would shame the government of President Bush. So the US units saw it as their mission to root out the remaining “bad guys”, who were obviously still there.

Night raids crashed through doors, humiliating and terrifying families, taking men away to be tortured for info about the other bad guys. It was here, and in black sites all over the world, that the American military and intelligence developed the new styles of torture that the world would briefly glimpse from Abu Ghraib, the American prison in Iraq.

Some of the men detained were Taliban who had not been fighting. Some were just people betrayed to the Americans by local enemies who coveted their land or held a grudge.

The American soldier Johnny Rico’s memoir Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green provides a useful account of what then happened next. Outraged relatives and villagers took a few potshots at the Americans in the dark. The American military kicked in more doors and tortured more men. The villagers took more potshots. The Americans called in airstrikes and their bombs killed family after family.

War returned across the south and east of the country.  

Inequality and corruption spiraled.

Afghans had hoped for development that could lift both the rich and the poor. It seemed like such an obvious, and such an easy thing to do. But they did not understand American policy abroad. And they did not understand the deep dedication of the 1% in the United States to spiraling inequality in their own country.

So American money poured into Afghanistan. But it went the people in the new government headed by Hamid Karzai. It went to the people working with the Americans and the occupying troops of other nations. And it went to the warlords and their entourages who were deeply involved in the international opium and heroin trade facilitated by the CIA and the Pakistani military. It went to the people lucky enough to own luxury, well-defended homes in Kabul they could rent out to expatriate staff. It went to the men and women who worked in foreign-funded NGOs.

Of course people in these groups all overlapped.

Afghans had long been used to corruption. They both expected it and hated it. But this time the scale was unprecedented. And in the eyes of the poor and middle income people, all the obscene new wealth, no matter how garnered, seemed to be corruption.

Over the last decade the Taliban have offered two things across the country. The first is that they are not corrupt, as they were also not corrupt in office before 2001. They are the only political force in the country this has ever been true of.

Critically, the Taliban have run an honest judicial system in the rural areas they have controlled. Their reputation is so high that many people involved in civil lawsuits in the cities have agreed that both parties will go to Taliban judges in the countryside. This allows them swift, cheap and fair justice without massive bribes. Because the justice was fair, both parties can live with it.

For people in Taliban-controlled areas, fair justice was also a protection against inequality. When the rich can bribe the judges, they can do anything they want to the poor. Land was the crucial thing. Rich and powerful men, warlords and government officials could seize or steal or cheat their way into control of the land of small farmers, and oppress the even poorer sharecroppers. But Taliban judges, everyone understood, were willing to rule for the poor.

Hatred of corruption, of inequality, and of the occupation merged together.

20 Years On

2001, when the Taliban fell to the Americans after 9/11, is twenty years ago now. Enormous changes happen to political mass movements over twenty years of war and crisis. The Taliban have learned and changed. How could it be otherwise. Many Afghans, and many foreign experts, have commented on this. Giustozzi has used the useful phrase neo-Taliban.[2]

This change, as publicly presented, has several aspects. The Taliban have realized that Pushtun chauvinism was a great weakness. They now emphasize that they are Muslims, brothers to all other Muslims, and that they want and have the support of Muslims of many ethnic groups.

But there has been a bitter split in Taliban forces over the last few years. A minority of Taliban fighters and supporters have allied themselves with Islamic State. The difference is that Islamic State launch terror attacks on Shias, Sikhs and Christians. The Taliban in Pakistan do the same, and so dp the small Haqqani network sponsored by Pakistani intelligence. But the Taliban majority have been reliable in condemning all such attacks.

We return to this division later, as it has implications for what will happen next.

The new Taliban have also emphasized their concerns for the rights of women. They say they welcome music, and videos, and have moderated the fiercest and most puritanical sides of their former rule. And they are now saying over and over again that they want to rule in peace, without revenge on the people of the old order.

How much of this is propaganda, and how much is truth, is hard to tell. Moreover, what happens next is deeply dependent on what happens to the economy, and on the actions of foreign powers. Of that, more later. Our point here is that Afghans have reasons for choosing the Taliban over the Americans, the warlords and Ashraf Ghani’s government.

What About Rescuing Afghan Women?

Many readers will now be feeling, insistently, but what about Afghan women? The answer is not simple.

We have to start by going back to the 1970s. Around the world, particular systems of gendered inequality are entangled with a particular system of class inequality. Afghanistan was no different.

Nancy did anthropological fieldwork with Pushtun women and men in the north of the country in the early 1970s. They lived by farming and herding animals. Nancy’s subsequent book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society, explains the connections between class, gender and ethnic divisions at that time. And if you want to know what those women themselves thought about their lives, troubles and joys, Nancy and her former partner Richard Tapper have recently published Afghan Village Voices, a translation of many of the tapes that women and men made for them in the field.

That reality was complex, bitter, oppressive and full of love. In that deep sense, it was no different from the complexities of sexism and class in the United States. But the tragedy of the next half century would change much of that. That long suffering produced the particular sexism of the Taliban, which is not an automatic product of Afghan tradition.

The history of this new turn starts in 1978. Then civil war began between the communist government and the Islamist mujahedin resistance. The Islamists were winning, so the Soviet Union invaded late in 1979 to back up the Communist government. Seven years of brutal war between the Soviets and the mujahedin followed. In 1987 the Soviet troops left, defeated.

When we lived in Afghanistan, in the early 1970s, the communists were among the best people. They were driven by three passions. They wanted to develop the country. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and share out the land. And they wanted equality for women.

But in 1978 the communists had taken power in a military coup, led by progressive officers. They had not won the political support of the majority of villagers, in an overwhelming rural country. The result was that the only ways they could deal with the rural Islamist resistance were arrest, torture and bombing. The more the communist led army did such cruelties, the more the revolt grew.

Then the Soviet Union invaded to prop up the communists. Their main weapon was bombing from the air, and large parts of the country became free fire zones. Between half a million and a million Afghans were killed. At least another million were maimed for life. Between six and eight million were driven into exile in Iran and Pakistan, and millions more became internal refugees. All this in a country of only twenty-five million people.

When they came to power, the first thing the communists tried to do were land reform and legislation for the rights of women. When the Russians invaded, the majority of communists sided with them. Many of those communists were women. The result was to smear the name of feminism with support for torture and massacre.

Imagine that the United States was invaded by a foreign power who killed between twelve million and twenty-four million Americans, tortured people in every town, and drove 100 million Americans into exile. Imagine also that almost all feminists in the United States supported the invaders. After that experience, how do you think most Americans would feel about a second invasion by another foreign power, or about feminism?

How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

So when the Soviet Union left, defeated, most people breathed a sigh of relief. But then the local leaders of the mujahedin resistance to the communists and the invaders became local warlords and fought each other for the spoils of victory. The majority of Afghans had supported the mujahedin, but now they were disgusted by the greed, the corruption and the endless useless war.

The Class and Refugee Background of the Taliban

In the autumn of 1994, the Taliban had arrived in Kandahar, a mostly Pashtun city and the largest in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban were like nothing before in Afghan history. They were products of two quintessentially twentieth century innovations, aerial bombing and the refugee camps in Pakistan. They belonged to a different social class from the elites who had governed Afghanistan.

The Communists had been the sons and daughters of the urban middle classes and the middle level farmers in the countryside with enough land to call their own. They had been led by people who attended the country’s sole university in Kabul. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and modernize the country.

The Islamists who fought the Communists had been men of similar class backgrounds, and mostly former students at the same university. They too wanted to modernize the country, but in a different way. And they looked to the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Alzhar University in Cairo.

The word Taliban means students in an Islamic school, not a state school or a university. The fighters of the Taliban who entered Kandahar in 1994 were young men who had studied in the free Islamic schools in the refugee camps in Pakistan. They had been children with nothing.

The leaders of the Taliban were village mullahs from Afghanistan. They did not have the elite connections of many of the imams of city mosques. Village mullahs could read, and they were held in some respect by other villagers. But their social status was well below that of a landlord, or a high school graduate in a government office.

The Taliban were led by a committee of twelve men. All twelve had lost a hand, a foot or an eye to Soviet bombs in the war. The Taliban were, among other things, the party of poor and middling Pushtun village men. [3]

Twenty years of war had left Kandahar lawless and at the mercy of warring militias. The turning point came when the Taliban went after a local commander who had raped a boy and two (possibly three) women. The Taliban caught and hung him. What made their intervention striking was not just their determination to put an end to the murderous infighting and restore people’s dignity and safety, but their disgust at the hypocrisy of the other Islamists.

From the first the Taliban were funded by the Saudis, the Americans and the Pakistani military. Washington wanted a peaceful country that could house oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia. The Taliban stood out because they brooked no exceptions to the injunctions they sought to impose, and the severity with which they enforced the rules.

Many Afghans were grateful for the return of order and a modicum of security, but the Taliban were sectarian and unable to control the country, and, in 1996, the Americans withdrew their support. When they did so, they unleashed a new, and deadly, version of Islamophobia against the Taliban.

Almost overnight, Afghan women were deemed helpless and oppressed, while Afghan men – aka the Taliban – were execrated as fanatical savages, paedophiles and sadistic patriarchs, hardly people at all.

For four years before 9/11 the Taliban had been targeted by the Americans, while feminists and others clamored for the protection of Afghan women. By the time the American bombing started, everyone was meant to understand that the Afghan women needed help. What could possibly go wrong?

9/11 and the American War

The bombing began on October 7th. Within days, the Taliban had been forced into hiding – or were literally castrated – as a photograph on the front page of the Daily Mail crowed. The published images of the war were truly shocking in the violence and sadism they portrayed. Many people in Europe were appalled by the scale of the bombing and the utter carelessness of Afghan lives.[4]

Yet in the United States that autumn, the mixture of vengeance and patriotism meant dissenting voices were rare and mostly inaudible. Ask yourself, as Saba Mahmood did at the time, ‘Why were conditions of war, (migration, militarization) and starvation (under the mujahideen) considered to be less injurious to women than the lack of education, employment and most notably, in the media campaign, western dress styles (under the Taliban)?’ [5]

Then ask again even more fiercely – how could you possibly ‘save Afghan women’ by bombing a civilian population that included, along with the women themselves, their children, their husbands, fathers and brothers? It should have been the question that ended the argument, but it was not.

The most egregious expression of feminist Islamophobia came little over a month into the war. A vastly unequal war of revenge doesn’t look very good in the eyes of the world, so better to be doing something that looks virtuous. In anticipation of the American Thanksgiving holiday, on the 17th of November 2001, Laura Bush, the President’s wife, loudly lamented the plight of the veiled Afghan women. Cherie Blair, the British Prime Minister’s wife echoed her sentiments a few days later. These wealthy war-mongers’ wives were using the full weight of the Orientalist paradigm to blame the victims and justify a war against some of the poorest people on earth. And ‘Saving Afghan Women’ became the persistent cry of many liberal feminists to justify the American war.[6]

With the election of Obama in 2008, the chorus of Islamophobia became hegemonic among American liberals. That year the American anti-war alliance effectively dissolved itself to aid Obama’s campaign. Democrats and those feminists who supported Obama’s war hawk Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, could not accept the truth that Afghanistan and Iraq were both wars for oil.[7]

They had only one justification for the endless wars of oil – the sufferings of Afghan women. The feminist spin was a clever ploy. It precluded comparisons between the undoubted sexist rule of the Taliban and sexisms in the United States. Far more shocking, the feminist spin domesticated and effectively displaced the ugly truths about a grossly unequal war. And it separated those notional ‘women to be saved’ from the tens of thousands of actual Afghan women, and men and children killed, wounded, orphaned or made homeless and hungry by the American bombs.

Many of our friends and family members in America are feminists who believed with decent hearts much of this propaganda. But they were being asked to support was a web of lies, a perversion of feminism. It was the feminism of the invader and the corrupt governing elite. It was the feminism of the torturers and the drones.

We believe another feminism is possible.

But it remains true that the Taliban are deeply sexist. Misogyny has won a victory in Afghanistan. But it did not have to be that way.

The communists who sided with the cruelties of the Soviet invaders had discredited feminism in Afghanistan for at least a generation. But then the United States invaded, and a new generation of Afghan women professionals sided with the new invaders to try to win rights for women. Their dream too has ended in collaboration, shame and blood. Some were careerists, of course, mouthing platitudes in exchange for funding. But many others were motivated by an honest and selfless dream. Their failure is tragic.

Stereotypes and Confusions

Outside Afghanistan, there is a great deal of confusion about stereotypes of the Taliban elaborated over the last twenty-five years. But think carefully when you hear the stereotypes that they are feudal, brutal and primitive. These are people with laptops, who have been negotiating with the Americans in Qatar for the last fourteen years.

The Taliban are not the product of medieval times. They are the product of some of the worst times of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. If they look backward in some ways to an imagined better time, that is not surprising. But they have been moulded by life under aerial bombardment, refugee camps, communism, the War of Terror, enhanced interrogation, climate change, internet politics and the spiralling inequality of neoliberalism. They live, like everyone else, now.

Their roots in a tribal society can also be confusing. But as Richard Tapper has argued, tribes are not atavistic institutions. They are the way that peasants in this part of the world organise their entanglement with the state. And the history of Afghanistan has never been simply a matter of competing ethnic groups, but rather of complex alliances across groups and divisions within groups.[8]

There is a set of prejudices on the left which incline some people to ask how the Taliban could be on the side of the poor and anti-imperialist if they are not “progressive”. Leave aside for the moment that the word progressive means little. Of course the Taliban are hostile to socialism and communism. They themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists. Moreover, any movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.

Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.

Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.

The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. Those words describe the same side.

None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats.

A Historic Change in America

The fall of Kabul marks a decisive defeat for American power around the world. But it also marks, or makes clear, a deep turning away from the American empire among Americans.

One piece of evidence is the opinion polls. In 2001, right after 9/11, between 85% and 90% of Americans approved of the invasion of Afghanistan. The numbers have been dropping steadily. Last month, 62% of Americans approved of Biden’s plan for total withdrawal, and 29% were opposed.

This rejection of the war is common on both the right and the left. The working class base of the Republican Party and Trump are against foreign wars. Many soldiers and military families come from the rural areas and the south where Trump is strong. They are against any more wars, for it is they and those they loved who served, died and were wounded.

Right wing patriotism in America now is pro-military, but that means pro-soldier, not pro-war. When they say ‘Make America Great Again’, they mean that America is not great now for Americans, not that the US should be more engaged in the world.

Among Democrats, too, the working class base is against the wars.

There are people who support further military intervention. They are the Obama democrats, the Romney republicans, the generals, many liberal and conservative professionals, and almost everyone in the Washington elite. But the American people as a whole, and especially the working class, black, brown and white, have turned against the American Empire.

After the fall of Saigon, the American government was unable to launch major military interventions for the next fifteen years. It may well be longer after the fall of Kabul.

The International Consequences

Since 1918, 103 years ago, the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world. There have been competing powers – first Germany, then the Soviet Union and now China. But the US has been dominant. That ‘American Century’ is now coming to an end.

The long-term reason is the economic rise of China and the relative economic decline of the United States. But the covid pandemic and the Afghan defeat make the last two years a turning point.

The covid pandemic has revealed the institutional incompetence of the ruling class, and the government, of the United States. The system has failed to protect the people. This chaotic and shameful failure is obvious to people around the world.

Then there’s Afghanistan. If you judge by expenditure and hardware the United States is overwhelmingly the dominant military power globally. That power has been defeated by poor people in sandals in a small country who have nothing but endurance and courage.

The Taliban victory will also give heart to Islamists of many different sorts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Mali. But it will be true more widely than that.

Both the covid failure and the Afghan defeat will reduce the soft power of the US. But Afghanistan is also a defeat for hard power. The strength of the informal empire of the United States has relied for a century on three different pillars. One is being the largest economy in the world, and domination of the global financial system. The second is a reputation in many quarters for democracy, competence and cultural leadership. The third was that if soft power failed, the United States would invade to support dictatorships and punish its enemies.

That military power is gone now. No government will believe that the US can rescue them from a foreign invader, or from their own people. Drone killings will continue and cause great suffering. But nowhere will drones on their own be militarily decisive.

This is the beginning of the end of the American century.

What Happens Now?

No one knows what will happen in Afghanistan in the next few years. But we can identify some of the pressures.

First, and most hopeful, is the deep longing for peace in the hearts of Afghans. They have now lived through forty-three years of war. Think how only five or ten years of civil war and invasion have scarred so many countries. Now think of forty-three years.

Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar, the three most important cities, have all fallen without any violence. This is because the Taliban, as they keep saying, want a country at peace, and they do not want revenge. But it is also because the people who do not support, indeed those who hate the Taliban, also chose not to fight.

The Taliban leaders are clearly aware they must deliver peace.

For that it is also essential that the Taliban continue to deliver fair justice. Their record is good. But the temptations and pressures of government have corrupted many social movements in many countries before them.

Economic collapse is also quite possible. Afghanistan is a poor and arid country, where less than 5% of the land can be farmed. In the last twenty years the cities have swelled immensely. That growth has been dependent on money flowing from the occupation, and to a lesser extent money from growing opium. Without very substantial foreign aid from somewhere, economic collapse will threaten.

Because the Taliban know this, they have been explicitly offering the United States a deal. The Americans will give aid, and in return the Taliban will not provide a home for terrorists who could launch attacks like 9/11. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have accepted this deal. But it is not at all clear that the US will keep that promise.

Indeed, something worse is entirely possible. Previous US administrations have punished Iraq, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam for their defiance with long running and destructive economic sanctions. There will be many voices raised in the US for such sanctions, to starve Afghan children in the name of human rights.

Then there is the threat of international meddling, of different powers supporting different political or ethnic forces inside Afghanistan. The United States, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia and Uzbekistan will all be tempted. It has happened before, and in a situation of economic collapse it could provoke proxy wars.

For the moment, though, the governments of Iran, Russia and Pakistan clearly want peace in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have also promised not to rule with cruelty. That is easier said than done. Confronted with families who have amassed great fortunes through corruption and crime, what do you think the poor soldiers from the villages will want to do?

And then there is climate. In 1971 a drought and famine across the north and center devastated flocks, crops and lives. It was the first sign of the effects of climate change on the region, which has brought further droughts over the last fifty years. Over the medium and long term, farming and herding will become more precarious.[9]

All these dangers are real. But the often insightful security expert Antonio Giustozzi is in touch with the thinking among both the Taliban and foreign governments and the Taliban. His article in The Guardian on August 16 was hopeful. He ended it:

Since most of the neighbouring countries want stability in Afghanistan, at least for the time being any fissures in the new coalition government are unlikely to be exploited by external actors to create rifts. Similarly, the 2021 losers will struggle to find anybody willing or able to support them in starting some kind of resistance. As long as the new coalition government includes key allies of its neighbours, this is the beginning of a new phase in the history of Afghanistan.[10]

What Can You Do? Welcome Refugees.

Many people in the West now are asking, “What can we do to help Afghan women?” Sometimes this question assumes that most Afghan women oppose the Taliban, and most Afghan men support them. This is nonsense. It is almost impossible to imagine the kind of society in which that would be true.

But there is a narrower question here. Specifically, how can they help Afghan feminists?

This is a valid and decent question. The answer is to organize to buy them airplane tickets and give them refuge in Europe and North America.

But it is not just feminists who will need asylum. Tens of thousands of people who worked for the occupation are desperate for asylum, with their families. So are larger numbers of people who worked for the Afghan government.

Some of these people are admirable, some are corrupt monsters, many lie in between, and many are just children. But there is a moral imperative here. The United States and the NATO countries have created immense suffering for twenty years. The least, the very least, they should do it rescue the people whose lives they have wrecked.

There is another moral issue here too. What many Afghans have learned in the last forty years has also been clear in the last decade of the torment of Syria. It is all too easy to understand the accidents of background and personal history which lead people to do the things they do. Humility compels us to look at the young communist woman, the educated feminist working for an NGO, the suicide bomber, the American marine, the village mullah, the Taliban fighter, the bereaved mother of a child killed by American bombs, the Sikh money changer, the policeman, the poor farmer growing opium, and to say, there but for the grace of God go I.

The failure of the American and British governments to rescue the people who worked for them has been both shameful and revealing. It is not really a failure, but a choice. Racism against immigration has weighed more strongly with Johnson and Biden than the debts of humanity.

Campaigns to welcome Afghans are still possible. Of course such a strong moral argument will come up against racism and Islamophobia at every turn. But in the last week the governments of Germany and Netherlands have both suspended any deportations of Afghans.

Every politician, anywhere, who speaks in support of Afghan women must be asked, again and again, to open the borders to all Afghans.

And then there is what might happen to the Hazaras. As we have said, the Taliban have stopped being simply a Pushtun movement and have gone national, recruiting many Tajiks and Uzbeks. And also, they say, some Hazaras. But not many.

The Hazaras are the people who traditionally lived in the central mountains. Many also migrated to cities like Mazar and Kabul, where they worked as porters and in other low paid jobs. They are about 15% of the Afghan population. The roots of enmity between Pushtuns and Hazaras lie partly in long standing disputes over land and rights to grazing.

But more recently it also matters a good deal that Hazaras are Shias, and almost all other Afghans are Sunnis.

The bitter conflicts between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq have led to a split in the militant Islamist tradition. This split is complicated, but important, and needs a bit of explanation.

In both Iraq and in Syria the Islamic State have committed massacres against Shias, just as Shia militias have massacred Sunnis in both countries.

The more traditional Al Qaeda networks have remained staunchly opposed to attacking Shias and argued for solidarity between Muslims. People often point out that Osama Bin Laden’s mother was herself a Shia – actually an Alawite from Syria. But the necessity of unity has been more important. This was the main issue in the split between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In Afghanistan the Taliban have also argued strongly for Islamic unity. The sexual exploitation of women by Islamic State is also deeply repugnant to Taliban values, which are deeply sexist but puritanical and modest. For many years the Afghan Taliban have been consistent in their public condemnation of all terror attacks on Shias, Christians and Sikhs.

Yet those attacks happen. The ideas of Islamic State have had a particular influence on the Pakistani Taliban. The Afghan Taliban are an organization. The Pakistani Taliban are a looser network, not controlled by the Afghans. They have carried out repeated bombings against Shias and Christians in Pakistan.

It is Islamic State and the Haqqani network who have carried out the recent racist terror bombings of Hazaras and Sikhs in Kabul. The Taliban leadership have condemned all those attacks.

But the situation is in flux. Islamic State in Afghanistan is a minority breakaway from the Taliban, largely based in Ningrahar province in the east. They are bitterly anti-Shia. So are the Haqqani network, a long-standing mujahedin group largely controlled by Pakistani military intelligence. Yet in the present mix, the Haqqani network have been integrated into the Taliban organization, and their leader is one of the leaders of the Taliban.

But no one can be sure what the future holds. In 1995 an uprising of Hazara workers in Mazar prevented the Taliban gaining control of the north. But Hazara traditions of resistance go much deeper and further back than that.

Hazara refugees in neighboring countries may also be in danger now. The government of Iran are allying with the Taliban, and begging them to be peaceful. They are doing this because there are about three million Afghan refugees already in Iran. Most of them have been there for years, most are poor urban workers and their families, and the majority are Hazaras. Recently the Iranian government, in desperate economic straights themselves, have begun deporting Afghans back to Afghanistan.

There are about a million Hazara refugees in Pakistan too. In the region around Quetta more than 5,000 of them have been killed in sectarian assassinations and massacres in the last few years. The Pakistani police and army do nothing. Given the long support of the Pakistani army and intelligence for the Afghan Taliban, those people will be at greater risk right now.

What should you do, outside Afghanistan? Like most Afghans, pray for peace. And join protests for open borders.

We will leave the last word to Graham Knight. His son, Sergeant Ben Knight of the British Royal Air Force, was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. This week Graham Knight told the Press Association the UK government should have moved quickly to rescue civilians:

 “We’re not surprised that the Taliban have taken over because as soon as the Americans and the British said they were going to leave, we knew this was going to happen. The Taliban made their intent very clear that, as soon as we went out, they would move in.

As for whether people’s lives were lost through a war that wasn’t winnable, I think they were. I think the problem was we were fighting people that were native to the country. We weren’t fighting terrorists, we were fighting people who actually lived there and didn’t like us being there.” [11]

Republished with permission from Anne Bonny Pirate 

REFERENCES

Fluri, Jennifer L. and Rachel Lehr. 2017. The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements. Athens OH: University of Georgia Press.

Giustozzi, Antonio. 2007. Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. London: Hurst.

—, ed. 2009. Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. London: Hurst.

—, 2021. ‘The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan – this time, how will they rule it?’ The Guardian, August 16.

Gregory, Thomas. 2011. ‘Rescuing the Women of Afghanistan: Gender, Agency and the Politics of Intelligibility.’University of Manchester PhD thesis.

Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. ‘Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2): 339-354.  

Hughes, Dana. 2012. ‘The First Ladies Club: Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush for the Women of Afghanistan.’ ABC News, March 21.

Jalalzai, Zubeda and David Jefferess, eds. 2011. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building. Durham: Duke University Press.

Klaits, A. & G. Gulmanadova-Klaits. 2005. Love and War in Afghanistan, New York: Seven Stories.

Kolhatkar, Sonali and James Ingalls. 200. Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. New York: Seven Stories.

Lindisfarne, Nancy. 2002a. ‘Gendering the Afghan War.’ Eclipse: The Anti-War Review, 4: 2-3.

—. 2002b. ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork. Gender and Imperialism Now.’ Critique of Anthropology, 22(4): 403-423, and in Armbruster and Laerke, 23-44.

—. 2012. ‘Exceptional Pashtuns?’ Class Politics, Imperialism and Historiography.’ In Marsden and Hopkins.

Lindisfarne, Nancy and Jonathan Neale, 2015. ‘Oil Empires and Resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.’ Anne Bonny Pirate.

—. 2019. ‘Oil, Heat and Climate Jobs in the MENA Region.’ In Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation, edited by Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian, 72-94. London: Ginko.

Manchanda, Nivi. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marsden, Magnus and Benjamin Hopkins, eds. 2012. Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. London: Hurst.

Mihailovič, Konstantin. 1975. Memoirs of a Janissary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Mount, Ferdinand. 2008. Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes. London: Bloomsbury.

Mousavi, Sayed Askar, 1998. The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study. London: Curzon. 

Neale, Jonathan. 1981. ‘The Afghan Tragedy.’ International Socialism, 12: 1-32.

—. 1988. ‘Afghanistan: The Horse Changes Riders,’ Capital and Class, 35: 34-48.

—. 2002. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan.’ International Socialism 93: 31-59.

—. 2008. ‘Afghanistan: The Case Against “the Good War”.’ International Socialism, 120: 31-60. 

Nojumi, Neamatollah. 2002. The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave.

Rico, Johnny. 2007. Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America. New York: Presidio.

Tapper (Lindisfarne), Nancy. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tapper, Richard, ed. 1983. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm.

Tapper, Richard, with Nancy Lindisfarne. 2020. Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community. London: I.B. Tauris.

The Guardian, 2021. ‘Afghanistan Live News.’ August 16.

Ward, Lucy, 2001. ‘Leader’s Wives Join Propaganda War.’ The Guardian, Nov 17.

Zaeef, Abdul, 2010. My Life with the Taliban. London: Hirst.

Zilizer, Barbie. 2005. ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan.’ The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(3): 26-55.

[1] See especially Nancy Tapper (Lindisfarne), 1991; Lindisfarne, 2002a, 2002b and 2012; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015; Neale, 1981, 1988, 2002 and 2008; Richard Tapper with Lindisfarne, 2020.

[2] Giustozzi, 2007 and 2009 are especially useful.

[3] On the class basis of the Taliban, see Lindisfarne, 2012, and many chapters by other authors in Marsden and Hopkins, 2012. And see Moussavi, 1998; Nojumi, 2002; Giustozzi, 2008 and 2009; Zareef, 2010.

[4] Zilizer, 2005.

[5] There is a vast literature on saving Afghan women. See Gregory, 2011; Lindisfarne, 2002a; Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002; Kolhatkar and Ingalls, 2006; Jalalzai and Jefferess,2011; Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Manchanda, 2020.

[6] Ward, 2001.

[7] Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015

[8] Richard Tapper, 1983.

[9] For the drought in 1971, see Tapper and Lindisfarne, 2020. For more recent climate change, see Lindisfarne and Neale, 2019.

[10] Giustozzi, 2021.

[11] The Guardian, 2021.

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The Supreme Court of the United States of America, in a monumental judgment, declared that federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers as well. This ruling has defied the Trump administration’s argument that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation. Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion and sex. The Court had to decide if “sex” can be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity choices.

The judgment was given by a majority of 6 to 3 and was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurred by Chief Justice John Roberts and four other liberal judges. As per UCLA’s William Institute, the LGBT+ community is made up of approximately 1 million workers who identify as transgenders and 7.1 million who are lesbian, gay and bisexual. In the US, 22 states and the District of Columbia already have statues in place to protect workers basis their sexual orientation and from gender identity based discrimination.

CNN reported the contents of the judgment that read as follows:

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids…”

“There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decision-making.” 

President Donald Trump responded to the judgment saying, “We live with the decision of the Supreme Court,” while also terming the decision to be ‘powerful’ and rather surprising for some.

The Obama administration on the other hand, supported LGBT+ workers in their discrimination claims under Title VII. When Barack Obama was the President, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had changed its longstanding interpretation of civil rights law to include discrimination against LGBT+ people but it had no specific protection for sexual orientation or gender identity.  

Dissenting opinion

The dissenting judgment written by Justice Samuel Alito read, “Even if discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity could be squeezed into some arcane understanding of sex discrimination, the context in which Title VII was enacted would tell us that this is not what the statute’s terms were understood to mean at that time.”

The petitions

The ruling came in separate cases, one of which was of a transgender woman Aimee Stephens, now deceased, who identified herself as a woman. She was terminated from her job as Director of a funeral home after she told her colleagues about the same and insisted on following the dress code meant for women. The other petitions were by Gerald Bostock, who claimed he was fired for being gay from his job as child welfare services coordinator despite of receiving good performance reviews for his job. Another petition was by deceased Donald Zarda who was allegedly fired from his job as sky diving instructor for being gay.

Bostock had lost both in District court as well as Court of Appeals and his fate was in the hands of the Supreme Court. Zarda, on the other hand got a favourable judgement at the Court of Appeals which had ruled that “Sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination”; and this ruling was in appeal at the Supreme Court. Stephens had also gotten a ruling in her favour at the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati which had ruled that discrimination against transgenders was forbidden by Title VII and said, “It is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex. Discrimination ‘because of sex’ inherently includes discrimination against employees because of a change in their sex.”

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In June 1972 when I first came to America, I lived in a room in Karl Meyer Hall, a residence for doctors in training. The housing was provided by my employer Cook County Hospital in Chicago. I was doing an internship that year with every 4th night on call (emergency duty) which meant about 36 hours of working more or less continuously.

While some of my colleagues from India soon moved out to apartments nearby or miles away, I stayed on at Karl Meyer Hall as it was a 2-minute walk to the hospital. Besides I didn’t know how to drive nor had I any money for several weeks except the five dollars that the Government of India had allowed me in foreign exchange.

My room, though quite small, was comfortable and took care of my needs at the time: a small desk, a bed, a chest of drawers, 2 chairs, a tiny closet, a bedside table with a telephone and a bathroom I shared with another intern – a common passage linking our 2 rooms to it. To me it was a luxury to have hot and cold water running, available then only at super expensive hotels in Bombay.

The County provided housekeeping services too. Juanita- a tall impressive lady, regal in her bearing, with a wide and friendly smile, was the housekeeper for my room. I don’t know how many other rooms Juanita was required to clean. I can still see her, dressed in her uniform, a bluish-green frock and white socks and shoes. The housekeepers came every week day, dusted and vacuumed the room, made the bed, changed the towels and emptied the trash among other things.

I soon realized how lucky I was to have Juanita as housekeeper. She kept the room in a ‘mint’ condition, making it a pleasant refuge when I came back to it after long hours in the hospital. Juanita and I would meet whenever I happened to come by in the afternoon on the days I was not on call. We would chit-chat about this and that.
In those days in India, we, or at least my family hadn’t heard of fitted sheets and had a folded charsa (a thick woven cotton sheet) at the bottom of the bed over the bedsheet (chaddar). So, I was used to rolling over with ease-the charsa covering me at night. I saw that Juanita tucked in the American version of charsa between the mattress and box springs. At night I would pull it out to conform with what I was used to in Bombay.

One night, too tired to pull the charsa out as I fell asleep, I then tried to pull it loose but could not. A bit irritated I got up to see why the charsa would not pry loose and saw to my amazement that Juanita had used large safety pins around the bottom of the bed to prevent me from pulling it out! The next afternoon when in my room, around the time Juanita generally came by to clean it, I asked her why she had pinned the sheet down. “You are such a wriggler. Every day you pull the sheet out” she said, “so I thought this way the sheet would stay in.” It became clear to me that her idea of a bedding and mine were at odds.  So, I suggested she tuck the sheet in but leave an extra sheet at the bottom of the bed, hence her sense of order and my habits could coexist. With a hearty laugh she agreed.

As the weeks passed by, I observed that not every housekeeper was as meticulous or had such high standards as Juanita for whenever she was not there her stand in, a pleasant white woman, would clean the room haphazardly, an indication that Juanita was away.

One day Juanita told me she would be on vacation for a few weeks. “Are you going anywhere,” I asked. “Yes, to Arkansas, that’s where I’m from,” she replied. “How will you go there,” I inquired. “I’ll drive there,” she said.

“How far is it from Chicago,” I asked. “Oh, about 700 miles,” replied Juanita. “Hmm, that’s far,” I said, “I guess it’ll take 2 days?”

“Oh no” came Juanita’s quick answer, “I’ll be there in 7 to 8 hours.”

“How so,” I asked. “Well, once I’m in the car I hit the gas pedal and off I go, I go at 80 miles an hour!”

 “Isn’t that too fast,” I asked. Juanita brushed my concerns aside, “No, it’s fine, I go just a bit over the speed limit, (it was 70) so it isn’t a problem.”

“Well drive safely, enjoy yourself and be back soon” I told her and she nodded happily.

After this I knew that Juanita had no more vacation days left for the year and would be the housekeeper for my room for the 5 to 6 months that remained for me to complete my internship at Cook County Hospital, a source of some relief and joy! A few weeks later I noticed that someone else was cleaning the room as Juanita’s high standard of maintenance was not evident. I wondered about this and hoped she wasn’t ill. Some days later, I happened to bump into Juanita’s colleague in the corridor. I asked her “Is Juanita not well? She hasn’t been coming these past few days.” The lady’s face changed into one of sheer horror. “Don’t you know?” she exclaimed, “Juanita’s daughter was killed by the police last week.”

I was stunned. It was some time before I was able to speak and ask what had happened.

“Well the police went into her building (Juanita’s daughter stayed on the second floor of a 3 flat) and as they were going up the stairs, they heard a sound coming from Juanita’s daughter’s door.” The police proceeded to spray the apartment’s door with a volley of bullets killing Juanita’s daughter. Shocked and uncomprehending how this could possibly be true, I finally stammered a few words asking the lady to page me when Juanita came back to work as I would like to meet her.

Several days later I was paged and went to my room where Juanita was busy with her work routine. On seeing me she sat down as did I. I sat there, not knowing what to say, feeling very inadequate and quite stupid and lowered my gaze to the floor. For a while neither of us said anything. Then Juanita said very softly “The Lord has strange ways.” I continued to be silent but a searing rage welled up in me. I was very angry with God and with the United States…”

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The post Juanita, and how I was angry with God and the United States appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On the occasion of Indian Republic Day, The Coalition to Stop Genocide, a broad coalition of Indian Americans and US based civil rights organizations and activists organized massive protests in multiple cities across the US as well as Toronto as part of a “Day of Action”.

A statement released by the group says, “The key objective of the protests was to demand the repeal of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India, and to urge action by the US government in this regard.” It added, “Every city where the protest was held reported huge crowds, including Chicago (5,000), New York (4,000), Washington, DC (3,000), Atlanta (2,000) and Bay Area, California (2,000).”

Speaking at a protest, Dalit rights activist and founder of Equality Labs, Ms. Thenmozhi Soundararajan said, “The CAA is an integral part of the Modi government’s strategy of creating a stateless Muslim population, that can be profiled, treated as second-class citizens, and imprisoned in massive detention centers already being built in India.”

Rev. Dr. Chloe Breyer, Executive Director of the Interfaith Center of New York, said, “The CAA makes an enemy of India’s own precious people damaging the pluralistic democracy that has existed since 1947 and has been such an inspiration to the world.”

The release also says how the Indian Embassy in Washington DC tried to drown out the sloganeering and speeches of the protesters by playing loud music. The protesters in Washington, DC collected at the Ellipse on the south side of White House and then marched to the Indian Embassy, where Indian officials had barricaded the Gandhi statue.

The Coalition to Stop Genocide includes several different organizations, including Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Equality Labs, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR).

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The Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI), a US-based body claiming to represent India’s minority communities, including Dalits and Adivasis, living in America, has raised the alarm that the international wing of the RSS has penetrates government offices across America, citing how the “US affiliate of Indian paramilitary” has been busy hosting “events with police, fire, elected officials”.

In a report published in its mouthpiece, OFMI has said, “Since August 9, the international wing of the RSS has hosted events in at least 17 government offices throughout the US, including those of two Congressmen and nine law enforcement departments, in a coordinated campaign.”

Asserting that a US-based human rights group, which OFMI does not name, has warned this is “an attempt to legitimize a fascist paramilitary responsible for pogroms against minorities in India”, the OFMI report quotes its leader Arvin Valmuci as saying, “Under the guise of celebrating Raksha Bandhan, a traditional Hindu ceremony, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) infiltrated multiple government offices, including many police departments.”

“Leaving aside the question of whether or not these government agencies should officially participate in a religious ceremony, they should absolutely have nothing to do with the HSS, which is the international wing of the RSS. This is an attempt by the HSS to legitimize a fascist paramilitary responsible for pogroms against minorities in India”, adds Valmuci.

The report says, “Participating government agencies include nine law enforcement departments in eight states, four fire departments in four states, and four elected officials in four states. US Congressional Representatives Bill Foster (D-IL) and Scott Peters (D-CA) are among the participants.”
 

At Naperville Police Department

It continues, “In Texas, Fort Bend County Commissioner Andy Meyers faced outcry on Facebook after sharing pictures of his participation. He subsequently revised his post to note that he was approached by a charter school requesting that he meet with local students, implying that he was not informed that the event would be hosted by the HSS. He has since deleted the post entirely.”

It provides a list of other government offices which also participated in the HSS-sponsored events: Coppell Police Department, Carmel Police Department, Dunwoody Police Department, Howard County Police Department, Naperville Police Department, San Ramon Police Department, Tredyffrin Township Police Department, and West Des Moines Police Department; Arlington Heights Fire Department, Harrisburg Fire Department, Louisville Fire Department, and Phoenix Fire Department, Fort Bend County Commissioner Andy Meyers, and Woodbridge Township Mayor John McCormac.
The report quotes Facebook comments to elucidate its view. “The HSS is the international wing of the RSS, a violent and supremacist paramilitary in India whose founders praised Nazi racial policy and modeled themselves along the same lines as the Hitler Youth,” wrote Haziq Jeelani on the Facebook of New Jersey’s Woodbridge Township Mayor John McCormac.

“They display pictures of these founders at most of their gatherings. They are a fascist organization not a religious group…. They are trying to normalize themselves and lend credibility to themselves by such photo ops. Please refrain from associating with them”, Jeelani added.

“Hi, actual person with ties to Coppell here,” wrote Sai Chimata on the Facebook of Texas’s Coppell Police Department. “Why the hell did y’all take these people seriously? Next time, do your research! The HSS is a foreign offshoot of the RSS, a militant Hindu nationalist organization in India, a literal paramilitary that’s been involved in some of India’s worst riots and pogroms. HSS-USA is essentially engaged in whitewashing Hindu nationalism abroad and promoting it among the diaspora.”

On Illinois’s Naperville Police Department, Khalid Azam, founding member of Indian American Muslim Council, wrote, “What a disgrace! This is a fascist organization (fascist is not being used as a slur here) —  HSS and its parent org, RSS, was founded by Moonje and others who visited Mussolini and Hitler and sought advice on how a similar organization and movement rooted in Fascism can be created in India. These founders have statements on the record defending fascism and Hitler’s treatment of Jews.”
 

At Howard County Police Department

“Seems RSS Hindutva Fascists, who are killing innocent Christians and other minorities, wanting a all Hindu state, are preparing groundwork in the US,” wrote Ranjit Singh on the Facebook of California’s San Ramon Police Department. “It seems they have vested very heavily into pulling this off in all police stations in the US. Wow, watch out!”

“Clearly, the Howard County Police Department is not aware that the HSS is the international wing of the RSS,” wrote Miriam Joseph on the Facebook of the Maryland law enforcement agency. “They are extremist Hindu supremacists who regularly lynch and kill Christians and Muslims in India. It was one of their members who shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi.”

The OFMI report says, “In the 21st century, the RSS is most notorious for staging two major pogroms against Indian minorities. In 2008, around 100 Christians were massacred in the Indian state of Odisha. Their churches and homes were burned and tens of thousands were made refugees. Odishan Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who was in office during the pogrom, reported, “Members of RSS… were involved in the violence.”

It adds, “In 2002, around 2,000 Muslims were massacred in the Indian state of Gujarat. Reporting on the violence, Human Rights Watch stated, “The groups most directly responsible for violence against Muslims in Gujarat include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the ruling BJP, and the umbrella organization RSS, all of whom collectively form the Sangh Parivar. These organizations, although different in many respects, have all promoted the argument that because Hindus constitute the majority of Indians, India should be a Hindu state.”

The report quotes the Human Rights Watch report, “We Have No Orders To Save You,” to point out that during the Gujarat riots, “several witnesses reported the police told them when they appealed for rescue from their attackers. Graffiti discovered on torched Muslim institutions declared, ‘The police are with us’. After the violence ended, many testified that police refused to file charges on behalf of the victims or record the names of the accused.”
 

Top: Congressman Bill Foster; Bottom: Congressman Scott Peters

It quotes award-winning novelist Arundhati Roy as saying that, in the years before the “pogrom” in Gujarat, “the police, the administration, and the political cadres at every level” were “systematically penetrated.”
Roy stated, “The RSS runs a shadow government that functions through tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and other ideologically affiliated organizations with different names — some of them astonishingly violent — spread across the country…. The RSS today has white supremacists and racists from the United States and Europe circling around it.”

Comments OFMI’s Valmuci, “We appreciate the open welcome government agencies in America provide to people of all religions, races, and backgrounds. Yet the RSS is, by its very nature, opposed to diversity and multiculturalism.”

He adds, “The presence of the RSS’ international wing in American police departments frightens minorities of Indian origin and inculcates a feeling of deep insecurity. We want these government agencies to apologize for hosting the HSS, to issue statements distancing themselves, and to disavow all future events with this international wing of a supremacist paramilitary.”

First published in https://www.counterview.net/

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Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he — like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations — was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month — May — of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president’s wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

U.S. Actions Have Central American Consequences
Scholars who study migration speak of two key explanations for why human beings leave their homes and migrate: “pull” and “push” factors. Pull factors would include the attractions of a new place, like economic and educational opportunities, religious and political liberties, and the presence there of family, friends, or community members from back home. Push factors driving people from their homes would include war; the drug trade; political, communal, or sexual violence; famine and drought; environmental degradation and climate change; and ordinary, soul-eating poverty.

International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can confer “refugee” status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum in other countries. This area of humanitarian law dates from the end of World War II, a time when millions of Europeans were displaced, forcing the world to adjust to huge flows of humanity. The 1951 Geneva Convention defines a refugee as anyone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”

Almost three-quarters of a century later, that legal definition still theoretically underlies U.S. policy toward refugees, but this country has always welcomed some refugees and not others. In the 1980s, for instance, Salvadorans fleeing U.S.-supported death squads had almost no hope of getting asylum here. On the other hand, people leaving the communist island of Cuba had only to put a foot on U.S. territory to receive almost automatic asylum.

Because of its origins in post-war Europe, asylum law has a blind spot when it comes to a number of forces now pushing people to leave their homes. It’s unfortunate that international law makes a distinction, for instance, between people who become refugees because of physical violence and those who do so because of economic violence. A well-founded fear of being shot, beaten, or raped may get you asylum. Actual starvation won’t.

Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from their homes, especially (once again) in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the power of the drug cartels, and climate change — all factors that, in significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.

According to World Bank figures, in 2016 (the latest year available), El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras took second place with 57 per 100,000, while tenth place went to Guatemala, with 27. Mexico wasn’t far behind with 19. (By comparison, with 5.3 per 100,000, the United States was far down the list.)

By any measure, the three Central American nations of what’s sometimes called “the Northern Triangle” are dangerous places to live. Here’s why.

Political repression and violent corruption: Honduras, for example, has long been one of Central America’s poorest and economically most unequal countries. In the 1980s, the United States supported a military-run government there that routinely “disappeared” and tortured its opponents, while the CIA used the country as a training ground for the Contras it backed,who were then fighting the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua (who had recently deposed their own U.S.-backed dictator).

By the turn of this century, however, things were changing in Honduras. In 2006, José Manuel Zelaya became president. Although he’d run on a conservative platform, he promptly launched a program of economic and political reforms. These included free public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.

In 2009, however, a military coup deposed Zelaya, installing Porfirio Lobo in his place. Four of the six officers who staged the coup were graduates of the U.S.’s notorious School of the Americas, where for decades Latin American military officers and police were trained in the ways of repression and torture.

Washington may not have initiated the coup, but within days Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had given it her seal of approval, supporting that power grab in defiance of the Organization of American States. Since then, murder rates have skyrocketed, while corruption and drug trafficking have flourished as the drug cartels and local governing bodies as well as the national government melded into a single countrywide nightmare. In a recent New York Times report, for instance, Sonia Nazario detailed what this has meant just for public transportation where anyone who operates a taxi or a bus must pay a daily tax (double on special days like Christmas) amounting to 30% to 40% of the driver’s income. But this isn’t a government tax. It goes to MS-13, the 18th Street gang (both of which arose in the United States), or sometimes both. The alternative, as Nazario reports, is death:

“Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hondurans working in transportation have been murdered — shot, strangled, cuffed to the steering wheel and burned alive while their buses are torched. If anyone on a bus route stops paying, gangs kill a driver — any driver — to send a message.”

The police, despite having all the facts, do next to no­thing. Violence and corruption have only become more intense under Honduras’s current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who returned to office in what was probably a stolen election in 2017. Although the Organization of American States called for a redo, the Trump administration hastily recognizedHernández and life in Honduras continued on its murderous course.

The drug business: Along with coups and Coca-Cola, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is another U.S. import to Central America. Although Donald Trump likes to cast most refugees as dark and dangerous gang members from south of the border, MS-13 had its roots in Los Angeles, California, among Salvadorans who had fled the U.S.-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. When young people who grew up in Los Angeles returned to El Salvador at the end of that country’s civil war, MS-13 went with them. What had begun as a neighborhood street gang created to protect Salvadoran youth from other gangs in that city has now grown into a vast criminal enterprise of its own — as has the 18th Street gang, or Calle 18, which also came out of Los Angeles, following a similar path.

Without a major market for their product, drug cartels would have vastly less power. And we all know where that market lies: right here in the United States. Fifty years of this country’s “war on drugs” turn out to have providedthe perfect breeding ground for violent outlaw drug cartels, while filling our own jails and prisons with more inmates than any other country holds. Yet it has done next to nothing to stanch addiction in this country. These days, if they remain in their own lands, many young people in the Northern Triangle face a stark choice between joining a gang and death. Not surprisingly, some of them opt to risk the trip to the U.S. instead. Many could have stayed home if it weren’t for the drug market in this country.

Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: Even if there were no corrupt regimes, no government repression, and no drug wars, people would still be fleeing Central America because climate change has made their way of life impossible. As what the New York Times calls the biggest carbon polluter in history, the United States bears much of the responsibility for crop failures there. The Northern Triangle has long been subject to periods of drought and flooding as part of a natural alternation of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena in the Pacific Ocean. But climate change has prolonged and deepened those periods of drought, forcing many peasants to abandon their subsistence farms. Some in Guatemala are now facing not just economic hardship but actual starvation thanks to a heating planet.

All along a drought corridor that runs from Nicaragua through Guatemala, the problem is a simple lack of water. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports that, in El Salvador, many people now spend their days in search of enough water to keep their families alive. Even where (unsafe) river water is available, the price — in money or sex — extracted by the gangs for using it is often too high for most women to pay, so they are forced to rely on distant municipal taps (if they even exist). While El Salvadorans live with strict water rationing, the U.S.-based multinational Coca Cola remains immune to such rules. That company continues to take all the water it needs to produce and sell its fizzy concoction locally, while pouring foul-smelling effluvia into nearby rivers.

In Honduras, on the other hand, the problem is often too much water, as rising sea levels eat away at both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts, devouring poor people’s homes and small businesses in the process. Here, too, a human-fueled problem is exacerbated by greed in the form of shrimp farming, which decimates coastal mangrove trees that normally help to keep those lands from eroding. Shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States, comes mostlyfrom Southeast Asia and — you guessed it — Central America. Whether it’s shrimp or drugs, the point is that U.S. desires continue to drive devastation in Central America.

As the Trump administration does everything it can to accelerate and deepen the climate crisis, Central Americans are literally dying from it. Under international law, however, if they head for the U.S. in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods, they don’t qualify as refugees because they are fleeing not physical but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.

No Asylum for You
These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention’s definition of “refugee” may no longer get asylum here. The Trump administration doesn’t even want to offer them a chance to apply for it. The president has, of course, called such groups of migrants, traveling together for safety and solidarity, an “invasion” of “very bad people.” And his administration continues to take a variety of concrete steps to prevent non-white refugees of just about any sort from reaching U.S. territory to make such a claim.

His early efforts to deter asylum seekers involved the infamous family-separation policy, in which children who arrived at the border were taken from their parents in an effort to create the sort of publicity that would keep others from coming. An international outcry — and a federal court order — brought an official end to that policy in June 2018. At the time, the government was ordered to return such children to their parents.

As it happened, the Department of Homeland Security proved largely incapable of doing so, because quite often it hadn’t kept decent records of the parents’ names or locations. In response to an ACLU lawsuit listing 2,700 individual children living without their families in this country, the administration acknowledged that, in addition to named children, thousands more fell into that category, lost in what can only laughingly be called “the system.”

You might think that, if the goal were to keep people from leaving their homes in the first place, the Trump administration would do what it could to improve life in the Northern Triangle. If so, however, you would be wrong. Far from increasing humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the administration promptly slashed those funds, ensuring yet more misery and undoubtedly forcing yet more to flee Central America.

Its most recent ploy: to require refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after leaving their own. Because Guatemala lies between Mexico and the rest of the Northern Triangle, that means Salvadorans and Hondurans will officially have to apply there first. President Trump even used the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such an agreement with that country’s outgoing president Jimmy Morales to secretly designate his nation a “safe third country” where migrants could apply for asylum.

There is something more than a little ironic in this, given that the Guatemalan government can’t even offer its own people anything like safety. Significant numbers of them have, of course, been fleeing to Mexico and heading for the U.S. border. Trump’s solution to that problem has been to use the threat of tariffs to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the process frustrating the new administration of president Andres Manuel López Obrador.

On August 1st, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction against that “safe third country” policy, prohibiting its use for the time being. For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the U.S. The administration will certainly fight the injunction in the courts, while doing everything in its power to stop those immigrants in any way it can.

Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from claiming asylum. Historically, family members of those persecuted in their own countries have been eligible to apply, too. At the end of July, Attorney General William Barr announced that “immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.” This is particularly cruel because, to extort cooperation from their targets, drug gangs routinely make — and carry out — threats of rape and murder against family members.

A Real Crisis
There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way — or in any way at all.

It’s time to recognize that the American way of life — our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government’s actions in our regional “backyard” — has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won’t be) our responsibility to solve it.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Rebecca Gordon

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/
 

The post How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In fact, no other country is as accountable as the United States for the Central American bedlam and resulting refugee crisis.

So why, despite the seemingly substantial ideological and political differences between right-wing Fox News and liberal CNN, both media outlets are working hard to safeguard their country’s dirty little secret?

In recent years, state and gang violence – coupled with extreme poverty – have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, among other countries in Central and South America.

US mainstream media, however, is rarely interested in the root cause of that reality.

Fox News is tirelessly peddling the offensive language used by President Donald Trump, which perceives the refugees as criminals and terrorists, who pose a threat to US national security.

At a press conference last October, Trump urged a reporter to take his camera into ”the middle” of a caravan of migrants on the treacherous journey through Mexico, to locate ”Middle Eastern” people that have infiltrated the crowd. In Trump’s thinking, ‘Middle Eastern people’ is synonymous with terrorists.

CNN has, on the other hand, labored to counter the growing anti-immigrant official and media sentiments that have plagued the US, a discourse that is constantly prodded and manipulated by Trump and his supporters.

However, few in the liberal media have the courage to probe the story beyond convenient political rivalry, persisting in their hypocritical and insincere humanitarianism that is divorced from any meaningful political context.

The fact is the Central American refugee crisis is similar to the plethora of Middle East and Central Asian refugee crises of recent years. Mass migration is almost always the direct outcome of political meddling and military interventions.

From Afghanistan, to Iraq, Libya, Syria, millions of refugees were forced, by circumstances beyond their control, to seek safety in some other country.

Millions of Iraqis and Syrians found themselves in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, while a far smaller number trickled to Europe, all seeking safety from the grinding wars.

Political opportunists in Europe are no different from their American counterparts. While the former has seized on the tragedy of the refugees to sow seeds of fear and hate-mongering, Americans, too, have blamed the refugees for their own misery.

Blaming the victim is nothing new.

Iraqis were once blamed for failing to appreciate Western democracy, Libyans for their failed state, Syrians for taking the wrong side of a protracted war, and so on.

Yet, the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Libya and Syria are all, in varied degrees ,outcomes of military interventions, a truth that does not seem to register in the self-absorbed minds of both right-wing and liberal intellectuals.

The irony is that the hapless refugees, whether those escaping to Europe or to the United States, are perceived to be the aggressors, the invaders, as opposed to the US and allies that had, in fact, invaded these once stable and sovereign homelands.

Trump has often referred to the Central American migrants’ caravan as an ‘invasion’.  Fox News parroted that claim, and injected the possibility of having the refugees shot upon arrival.

If Fox News lacked the decency to treat refugees as human beings deserving of sympathy and respect, CNN lacked the courage to expand the discussion beyond Trump’s horrid language and inhumane policies.

To expand the parameters of the conversation would expose a policy that was not introduced by Trump, but by Bill Clinton and applied in earnest by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Media grandstanding aside, both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the current refugee crisis.

In 1996, Democratic President Clinton unleashed a war on refugees when he passed two consecutive legislations: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Millions of people – who had escaped US-instigated wars and military coups –were deported back to Central and South America. While 2 million people were deported during the Bush terms, 2.5 million were deported under Obama.

A terrible situation was exacerbated. Violence and want flared even more.

To rally his angry and radicalized constituency, Trump waved the migrant card once more, threatening to build a “great wall” and to close “loopholes” in the US immigration law.

Like his predecessors, he offered little by way of redressing an unjust reality that is constantly fomented by destructive US foreign policy, stretching decades.

But the refugees kept on coming, mostly from Central America’s Northern Triangle region. Without proper political context, they, too, were duly blamed for their hardship.

Considering Fox News and CNN’s lack of quality coverage, this is not surprising. Few Americans know of the sordid history of their country in that region, starting with the CIA-engineered coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954, or the US support of the coup against the democratically-elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in 2009, or of everything else that happened in between these dates.

The unhealthy relationship between the US and its southern neighbors goes back as early as 1904, when President Theodore Roosevelt declared the ‘right’ of his country to hold “international police power” in Latin America. Since then, the entire region has been Washington’s business.
The free trade agreement (CAFTA-DR) signed between Central American countries and the US has done its own share of damage. It “restructured the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weakened domestic industries,”wrote Mark Tseng-Putterman in Medium.

Acknowledging all of this is threatening. If US mainstream pundits accept their country’s destructive role in Central and South America, they will be forced to abandon the role of the victim (embraced by the right) or the savior (embraced by the left), which has served them well.
The same stifling political and intellectual routine is witnessed in Europe, too.

But this denial of moral responsibility will only contribute to the problem, not to its resolution. No amount of racism on the part of the right, or crocodile tears of the liberals, will ever rectify this skewed paradigm.

This is as true in Central America as it is in the Middle East.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/
 

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New York: A Sikh man has been stabbed to death at his store in the US state of New Jersey, the third incident targeting the minority Sikh community in the country in three weeks.
 
Terlok Singh was discovered dead by his cousin on Thursday, Aug 16, in his store with an apparent stab wound in the chest.
 
The Essex County Prosecutor’s office is calling the incident a homicide, according to a report in ABC7NY.
 
The motive behind the killing was not immediately known.
 
Singh, described as a very kind person, is survived by his wife and children who live in India. He owned the store to support his family.
 
His family closed the store as a deeply-saddened community watched in horror.
 
The news report said Singh ran his store for at least six years and a neighbour said he should not have had to worry about being attacked in his workplace.
 
Civil rights organisation the Sikh Coalition, in a Facebook post, expressed condolences to Singh’s family, friends and local community. Simran Jeet Singh, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Centre for Religion and Media and a Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, tweeted about Singh’s tragic death, saying, “This is the third attack on a Sikh in the last three weeks. So tired of all this sadness.”
 
On August 6 in Manteca, California, 71-year-old Sahib Singh was brutally attacked by Tyrone McAllister and a juvenile when the elderly man went on a morning walk.
 
McAllister, who is this son of a local police chief, and the juvenile were charged with attempted robbery, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon.
 
On July 31, 50-year-old Surjit Malhi was attacked while putting up campaign signs in support of incumbent Republican Congressman Jeff Denham and other local Republican candidates.
While beating Malhi, the attackers yelled ‘Go back to your country!’ and spray-painted the same message, along with hate symbols, on his truck.
 
Following the two incidents, the Sikh Coalition had urged members of the community to know their rights, remain vigilant and report cases of bias, bigotry and backlash in the wake of the attacks.
 
“We are deeply troubled by these two recent attacks and strongly encourage increased vigilance nationwide as we work to support the Central Valley, California community during this difficult time,” Sikh Coalition Legal Director Amrith Kaur had said.
 
PTI and Indians Abroad
 

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he Iraq War memorial in Santa Monica, California (Photo: Kevin Dooley / Flickr)

Millions of Americans will spend Memorial Day at community picnics, family barbecues or local parades. “Thank you for your service” will be a ubiquitous phrase.

Despite that annual refrain, we’re very far from honoring our veterans. Though drone strikes and bombing campaigns have reduced casualty figures (in fact, more people have died in school shootings this year than in the military), too many of our young women and men still come home from our wars destroyed physically and devastated emotionally.

In addition to grievous bodily injuries, many come home suffering from trauma, addiction and moral injury — the sense, as Veterans for Peace Director Michael McPhearson explains, that “you’re not really standing on stable moral ground” after you’ve been ordered to kill people. At home they confront an overburdened veterans’ health system, which the administration wants to make worse by privatizing.

The numbers are staggering. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops — 100,000 or more at time — have served in Afghanistan alone. At almost 17 years on, it’s our nation’s longest war. Some 15,000 troops are still deployed there.

Yet does anyone other than their families even think about them?

Numerous military and political leaders have acknowledged that the Afghan war is unwinnable, yet the deployments continue. Meanwhile, Afghans — children, old people, journalists, wedding parties — continue to die. Some are killed by U.S. airstrikes, others by Afghan government or opposition forces. The killing goes on because we help perpetuate a permanent war that almost everyone agrees cannot be won.

But it’s not just U.S. troops and Afghans who pay for this folly. The rest of us do, too — more dearly than many realize.

The Pentagon says the war in Afghanistan will cost us $45 billion this year alone. If we didn’t spend that money on an unwinnable war thousands of miles away, what could we do with it instead?

For starters, we could hire 556,779 well-paid elementary school teachers in struggling states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia, where teachers have protested abysmal conditions. Or create 809,999 new well-paid jobs to rebuild infrastructure like the broken water system in Flint, Michigan.

Or provide 4.36 million veterans with health care. Now that would be something.

And that’s just for one year of one war. All told, our full $700 billion-plus military budget sucks up 53 cents out of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget — compared to just 15 cents for poverty alleviation. Our troops and Afghan civilians pay the price, but so do the 140 million Americans living in poverty or with very low incomes.

When people talk about universal health care, education, infrastructure and debt-free college, the conversation usually ends with “too bad we can’t afford it, we don’t have the money.”

But that’s not true. We have plenty of money — the United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. What we don’t have is a moral compass that recognizes that spending more than half of the available funds on a giant military mired in wars that don’t keep us safe is wrong.

Remember those school kids who said “no more thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings? They’re demanding action. So let’s take a page from their book. For next Memorial Day, let’s say “No more thank you for your service.”

Instead, we need action, and a new moral compass — one that recognizes that the best way to honor our veterans, keep people safe, end poverty, and fund jobs, education and health care for veterans and everybody else is to end the wars.

This spring, we helped launch a new Poor People’s Campaign to revive the movement against what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago called the “evil triplets” of racism, materialism and militarism. And for the next few weeks, people are holding actions in at least 30 state capitals and the District of Columbia to start bringing our war dollars home to build a just new economy. Check out poorpeoplescampaign.org to find out about events happening near you.

The cost of our military is creating a national moral crisis, where our priorities are skewed, vulnerable communities are threatened, and our veterans aren’t being honored. This year, let’s honor them with action. Let’s end the wars.
 

The post The Best Way to Protect Americans? End the Wars appeared first on SabrangIndia.