World

The departure of American troops from Afghanistan is being lamented (or hailed — see the Chinese press, passim) as a defeat. But this is a shortsighted attitude, at least from the point of view of the US military and the multitude of interested parties who feed at its trough. For them, the whole adventure has been a thumping success, as measured in the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have flowed through their budgets and profits over the two decades in which they successfully maintained the operation. The truth of this was forcefully brought home to me once by a friend of mine who, as a mid-level staffer, attended a conclave of senior generals discussing Donald Trump’s Afghan mini-surge back in 2018.

Glenn Greenwald wants right-wing populists to understand that the CIA is not their friend. On Sunday thousands of Cubans swarmed the streets of Havana amid ongoing blackouts, food shortages and rising prices. Increasing COVID infections have strained the island's healthcare system and put medical care at a standstill. The protests are the largest of their kind in over a decade. In turn, the government began a crackdown. More than 100 activists and journalists are reportedly in custody. One male protester was shot in his home on Wednesday during a police raid. Facebook and Twitter played a crucial role in allowing the rest of the world to witness the unrest — so of course the Cuban government has banned those platforms in the last 72 hours.

‘The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese,’ Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware intoned on the Senate floor as South Vietnam neared collapse in 1975. Thankfully, the Ford administration ignored this shameful advice. One of the more regrettable statements of its decade, it was likely one of the positions former Obama defense secretary Robert Gates had in mind when he wrote that Biden ‘has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. When the United States left Vietnam in 1973, it took two years for Saigon to fall to the Communists.

In May 2017, TIME magazine published a cover showing the White House being infected and taken over by Russian onion domes. The image meant to suggest that Donald Trump was a sleeper agent on behalf of Vladimir Putin. This sort of thinking was the driving force behind four years of media hysterics and seemingly endless cable news segments portraying Trump as a Russian puppet. ​With Joe Biden, naturally, the media has adopted a distinctly different tone — especially when it comes to the President’s relations with Russia: this despite six months of Team Biden’s complacency towards Russia, bad actors and even Putin himself. Gone are the accusations of ransom and pee tapes, or treachery — even as Russia makes aggressive moves on the world stage and towards the United States.

The objectives of the Authorized Use of Military Force approved by Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. Our mission in Afghanistan was complete. But we did not leave. Why? The arrogance of a Military Industrial Congressional Complex that saw an opportunity to turn Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy, using American taxpayer money to fund the experiment, over a 20-year period. It failed. A dirty secret: most of the money spent to help Afghanistan and its people was spent in Washington DC to enrich individuals and corporations that did nothing to help develop Afghanistan — a sad truth that my late friend Jerry Doyle called ‘combat to commerce’.

‘Western civilization would be a good idea,’ joked Mahatma Gandhi, one of its most successful pupils. We are accustomed to hearing what is wrong with Western civilization: racism, sexism, colonialism and (gasp) capitalism. The world would be a kind of utopia, we are told, if only we could purge these sins from our societies. But if Western civilization is evil, what is the alternative? Four other -isms vie for our attention. The first is socialism. Its proponents include some old-fashioned Marxists, faithful to the old egalitarian nostrums, but most are pseudo- or neo-Marxists. The ‘woke’ activists fundamentally oppose capitalism and are aggressively committed to intersectionality, but they are vague on the alternatives. We can assume that they will not end in utopia.

In late 2018, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture, was contacted by lawyers representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, asking him to intervene on their client’s behalf. ‘I was like, “No. Not this guy. Isn’t this the rapist hacker guy?”’ Melzer recalls. He ignored the email. Three months later, the lawyers contacted him again, this time warning that Assange’s extradition to the US — where he faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents — could be imminent.

There was a time when summit meetings between the presidents of Russia and the US were world-historical events on which the balance of world peace rested. Today — not so much. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin didn’t even manage to fill the five hours allotted for their talks in Geneva today in large part because they simply didn’t have much to talk about. Russia today threatens no US vital interests, commands no alliances or strategic resources and remains a world power in only two areas, both inherited from the Cold War — its large nuclear arsenal and its UN Security Council veto.

This week's Nato summit communiqué was predictably replete with bombast about the ever growing threat of Russian aggression — along with tentative references to the 'challenges' of China's 'growing influence’. More cheerfully, it greeted the news that '24 allies are spending over 20 percent of their defense expenditures on major equipment’, with confident hopes that newcomers would join this exclusive club in the near future. Given that for seven European Nato members the principal item of ‘major equipment’ in question is Lockheed's F-35 fighter, this is good news for the Lockheed Corporation, but not such glad tidings for countries contracted to buy the plane, who find their armed forces steadily reduced to a state of emasculated beggary as a result.

All eyes today are on…Carrie and Jill, as the remainder of the G7 summit is effortlessly overshadowed by the leaders’ spouses. The First Lady of the US is having tea today with Carrie Johnson — this being Cornwall, it will be a cream tea, with scones. This is pretty well obligatory when you visit Cornwall. Mrs Johnson is not actually first lady of the UK, since no such role exists, and the only First Lady is the Queen, but irritatingly the British media have adopted the Americanism, so stand by for headlines along the lines of 'First Ladies Meet’. Thank goodness, then, the British prime minister got round to marrying his girlfriend just last Saturday, before the summit — in fact, one wonders whether the nuptials were timed precisely to avoid any awkwardness.

António Guterres, the UN's secretary-general, has described rising anti-Semitism as a ‘multi-headed monster' of intolerance that's creating a ‘tsunami of hatred’ across the world, and the UN proclaims ‘anti-racism’ as its defining ideology. But the UN is failing to confront discrimination and violence against Jews — and at times even nurturing it. The UN special rapporteur on racism, E. Tendayi Achiume, ought to be among the leading global voices speaking out against Jew hate. Last year, she called on Bulgaria to stop hate speech and discrimination against the Roma, she urged the Human Rights Council to address abuses against people of African descent and she appealed to world leaders to confront 'structural forms of racial and ethnic injustice’.