Will Trump Administration Abandon NATO Alliance if Re-elected?

Michael Crowley reported for the New York Times [1] Thursday, September 3, that American allies and former US Officials fear Trump could seek NATO exit in a second term. According to the report, “This summer, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton published a book that described the president as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the NATO alliance. Last month, Mr. Bolton speculated to a Spanish newspaper that Mr. Trump might even spring an ‘October surprise’ shortly before the election by declaring his intention to leave the alliance in a second term.”

The report adds, “In a book published this week, Michael S. Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, wrote that Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, told others that ‘one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.’ One person who has heard Mr. Kelly speak in private settings confirmed that he had made such remarks.”

Donald Trump now relies on “a team of inexperienced bureaucrats” and has grown more confident and assertive, as he has already sacked purportedly “seasoned national security advisers,” including John F. Kelly; Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general and Trump’s first defense secretary; and H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general and Trump’s former national security adviser.

In July, the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon’s European Deterrence Initiative, though the main factor that prompted Trump to pull out American forces from Germany was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refusal to attend G-7 summit in person due to coronavirus outbreak. The summit was scheduled to be held at Camp David on June 10 but was cancelled. About half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and Poland, and the rest returned to the US.

Historically, the NATO military alliance at least ostensibly was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the former Soviet clients, the Central and Eastern European states, to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or be internationally isolated. If not Washington, the Europeans themselves should have abandoned the redundant militarist organization long ago.

Regarding the global footprint of American forces, according to a January 2017 infographic [2] by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were deployed across the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.

Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of the US troops, particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops were stationed in Germany since the end of the Second World War and before the withdrawal of 12,000 US forces in July, 15,000 American troops were deployed in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is already shared between Washington and host countries.

Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.

Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar – pay two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of world’s 1,477 billion barrels proven oil reserves are located, and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.

Besides withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany, the Trump administration has also pledged to scale down American troop presence in Afghanistan after reaching a peace deal with the Taliban on February 29. The United States currently has about 8,600 troops in Afghanistan, and plans to cut its troop levels in Afghanistan to “a number less than 5,000” by the end of November, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced in August, before the complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan by April next year, as stipulated by the terms of the peace pact reached with the Taliban at Doha, Qatar.

If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack. Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for the Bush administration.

The number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as the American president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 to expropriate its 140 billion barrels proven oil reserves, and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.

It was the ostensibly “pacifist and noninterventionist” Obama administration that made the Afghanistan conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from Iraq in December 2011, only to be redeployed a couple of years later when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.

At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000 troops deployed by the rest of the NATO members, but they still could not manage to have a lasting impact on the relentless Taliban insurgency.

Similarly, the Nobel-laureate President Obama initiated a proxy war in Syria in 2011 to safeguard Israel’s regional security because the Bashar al-Assad government in alliance with Hezbollah in Lebanon constituted single biggest threat to Israel’s northern borders, a fact that became obvious to Israeli military strategists when Hezbollah mounted hundreds of rocket attacks into northern Israel during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.

After being elected, the Trump administration had to contend with the legacy of its predecessor. But thankfully, the conflict in Syria is gradually winding down. Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria last year, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria. After the drawdown of US troops at Erdogan’s insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria, the US has still deployed around 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and at al-Tanf military base.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained thousands of Syrian militants in the military base battling the Syrian government.

It’s pertinent to note that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel’s concerns regarding the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Regarding the continued presence of American forces in oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it’s worth pointing out that Syria used to produce roughly 400,000 barrels crude oil per day. Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confessed [3] last month that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria.

Much like the “scorched earth” battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic State which burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds in eastern Syria – Washington’s basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to Damascus.

After the devastation caused by nine years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington hampering efforts to provide international assistance to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over Syria’s own valuable resources.

Finally, after liberating Mosul and Anbar from the Islamic State in Iraq in July 2017 and Raqqa in Syria in October 2017, the Trump administration has decided [4] to reduce the number of American troops deployed in Iraq from current 5,200 to 3,500 troops in the next three months.

Another reason why Washington can no longer maintain large troop presence in Iraq is that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed that Iran would not tolerate the presence of American forces in Iraq following the brazen assassination of venerated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January, and American military bases in Iraq have come under repeated rocket and missile attacks, particularly in an Iranian missile strike at al-Assad military base in January, scores of American troops suffered concussion injuries and had to be evacuated to Germany for treatment.

Footnotes:

[1] Allies and Former U.S. Officials Fear Trump Could Seek NATO Exit in a Second Term:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/trump-nato-withdraw.html

[2] What the U.S. Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/16/world/trump-military-role-treaties-allies-nato-asia-persian-gulf.html

[3] Delta Crescent Energy awarded the contract to extract Syria’s oil:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/20/opinion/oil-could-keep-us-middle-east-very-long-time/

[4] US to reduce number of troops in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,500 in next three months.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-troops-iraq-pentagon-trump-soldiers-a9694081.html 

How Pakistan’s Military Created Rift Between Imran Khan and Modi?

During his stint in power as Pakistan’s prime minister until July 2017, Nawaz Sharif had nurtured cordial working relationship with India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi. This, along with his role in Kargil conflict of 1999 with India, was precisely the reason why Pakistan’s military establishment turned against him and he was eventually disqualified from holding public office by a Pakistan’s apex court’s ruling in July 2017 acting on the instructions of the establishment.

Imran Khan is himself a secular liberal and is known to have cultivated close friendships with many Indian celebrities, including with glamorous “Khans of Bollywood,” during his cricketing career. He is also credited with inaugurating a Sikh Gurdwara at Kartarpur, to the opening ceremony of which former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was also invited, and for allocating land for a Hindu temple to be built in Islamabad since assuming premiership in August 2018.

Pakistan’s military is wary of pacifist tendencies of civilian politicians and jealously guards its traditional national security domain. Therefore, within months of Imran Khan being inaugurated as prime minister of Pakistan, a terrorist attack took place in Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir on the Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2019, inflicting 40 fatalities among Indian paramilitary forces. The vehicle-bound suicide attack was conducted by a Kashmiri native Adil Dar allegedly belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militant outfit operating from across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The timing of the terrorist attack was critical as it happened on the eve of Indian general elections due to take place in May 2019. Some sort of retaliation was obvious, but what Narendra Modi did, even Pakistani military strategists could not have anticipated it.

In a pre-dawn airstrike on February 26, 2019, 12 Indian Mirage 2000 fighter jets intruded into Pakistan’s airspace and dropped their payload on the top of a mountain at a terrorist training camp, allegedly belonging to the same jihadist group that had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir on February 14, 2019.

Although Pakistan military’s officials claimed after the Indian incursion that the Indian jets had intruded 3-4 miles in Muzaffarabad sector of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to location provided by local residents and subsequent news reports, the site of the airstrike was deep inside the Pakistani territory between Balakot and Mansehra in northwestern Pakistan. Thankfully, no loss of lives was reported as the bombs fell in the open and created four large craters.

In response, Pakistan’s air force struck six targets inside Indian-administered Kashmir the next day on February 27. Indian air force chased Pakistani aircrafts inside Pakistan-administered Kashmir where an Indian MiG-21 aircraft was shot down by Pakistan’s air force and an Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman was arrested, who was released a couple of days later on March 1, 2019, as a gesture of goodwill on the orders of Prime Minister Imran Khan, even though Pakistan’s military’s top brass had reservations against his unconditional release.

Although the military escalation between nuclear-armed rivals was amicably resolved, the confrontation soured the relationship between Imran Khan and Narendra Modi to the extent that Imran Khan began calling Modi a Hindu fascist and the latter in turn couldn’t stand the sight of Imran Khan.

The February 2019 face-off between Pakistani and Indian armed forces was reminiscent of another stand-off between the hostile neighbors a decade earlier in November 2008. In August 2008, Pakistan’s longtime dictator General Pervez Musharraf was ousted from power and a liberal and secular Pakistan People’s Party formed the government.

Wary of a rapprochement between civilian-led governments in Pakistan and India, Pakistan’s military establishment orchestrated another terrorist attack in November 2008 in which ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan, carried out twelve coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across the Indian metropolis Mumbai, inflicting 174 fatalities including nine attackers. One of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, was captured alive who was subsequently hanged in November 2012.

In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as the military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.

Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have institutional interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the 1960s was a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad was evidently a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again regarded as a liberal establishment.

Similarly, the Egyptian and Turkish military establishments also have a liberal outlook, but they are equally capable of forming alliances with conservatives if and when it suits the institutional interests of military. In fact, since military’s top brass is mostly groomed in urban milieus, therefore its high-ranking officers are more likely to have liberal temperaments.

The establishment does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weaknesses. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it would join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it would form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of the “deep state” on its traditional domain, the security and defense policy of a country.

The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies, but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals by their very training have a chauvinistic mindset and a hawkish temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.

All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were nurtured by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment in the 1960s as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League in the East Pakistan province of Pakistan, which is now a separate country Bangladesh, though the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) later turned out to be a fiercely anti-establishment political force under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto.

Similarly, Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the 1980s to offset the influence of Benazir Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party, which was deemed a “security risk” by the military’s top brass. And finally, Imran Khan was groomed by General Musharraf’s establishment to counterbalance the ascendancy of Nawaz Sharif, who had fallen out with the establishment after the Pakistani military’s ill-conceived Kargil operation in the Indian-administered Kashmir in 1999.

It’s quite ironic, however, that as soon as the establishment’s former protégés develop a political constituency for themselves, they opportunistically turn against their erstwhile patrons in the military and strive to monopolize power in the hands of their respective political organizations. It might take some time for the newly elected government of Imran Khan to cross swords with its rogue benefactors, but it is bound to happen sooner or later.

Regardless, Prime Minister Imran Khan is an educated, well-informed, articulate and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.

It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a liberal. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.

His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.

Finally, we need to bear in mind the fact that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women and youth voters. Both these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women which constitute more than 50% of population in every society.

How Obama Administration Covered Up Swine Flu Pandemic?

It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of common characteristics with COVID-19 pandemic.

Although official statistics are much lower, according to subsequent peer-reviewed studies [1], H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 infected 700 million to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities only in the first year of the outbreak in 2009.

Cumulative number of fatalities in subsequent years could be well above a million of which hundreds of thousands of deaths could have occurred in the worst affected countries, the US, Mexico and Brazil, though unreported because extensive testing wasn’t done at the time of the outbreak.

Even though vaccine was invented in 2010, the H1N1 virus was eventually defeated, particularly in the developing world, by natural immunity and not be medical remedies. WHO reclassified it as “variant of seasonal flu” and the dreaded designation “pandemic” was removed in August 2010.

The reason why corporate media and international health organizations shirked their responsibility to create public awareness on the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US, Mexico and Brazil was due to the fact that the US economy was going through economic recession that began in 2008 and lasted into 2009, whereas the swine flu epidemic began in March 2009 and lasted into 2010.

Extensive media coverage of the outbreak could have further exacerbated the recession, which it did in part, but thankfully no sweeping lockdowns or quarantine measures were enforced then. Mainstream news outlets were hushed up from reporting on the H1N1 epidemic by then newly elected Obama administration, and self-censorship from a decade ago appears to have restrained corporate media from mentioning the name of swine flu pandemic even now.

Whether it’s swine flu of 2009 or coronavirus outbreak of today, pandemics are like a deluge that can be managed to minimize the damage but cannot be contained. All it takes is a small crack in the embankment for the force of nature to unleash its fury and eliminate all obstacles coming in its way.

When the epidemic is surging exponentially, the contagion infects millions of people within the short span of several months, of which only a minuscule fraction exhibits symptoms and is diagnosed with the infection, while the rest are asymptomatic and go unnoticed. But they develop resistance against re-infection, thus contributing to achieving herd immunity.

Had political correctness been the remedy, designating coronavirus outbreak as seasonal flu would solve the dilemma, as WHO reclassified swine flu pandemic as common cold in August 2010 and gave the international economy breathing space in the aftermath of 2008-9 global recession.

Technically, a patient tested positive for HIV virus isn’t said to be suffering from AIDS. AIDS is the severe form of the infection when dormant HIV virus becomes active, begins replicating and starts causing harm to the body tissues and organs. Similarly, a patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 isn’t actually suffering from COVID-19, unless the patient develops symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Treatment and hospitalization is only needed for severe cases of COVID-19, and asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection simply have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks either at homes or at quarantine centers until their natural immunity overcomes the virus so they don’t pose a risk of spreading infection among communities.

Periodically, epidemics come and go. They are defeated by body’s natural immune system and don’t need treatment. Certain contagions, like Ebola with case fatality ratio of 90%, require preventive measures, such as quarantines and lockdowns, but the rest, like H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu and SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 with infection fatality ratio of less than 0.2%, are treated like common cold that causes tens of thousands deaths every year in the US alone. Common cold influenza spreads across the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.

Even though the infection fatality rate of H1N1 swine flu was lower, at 0.02%, compared to COVID-19’s 0.2%, if the total number of cases in the calculation is reduced from 1.4 billion to a few hundred million and the actual number of fatalities caused by swine flu in 2009-10 is accurately calculated, then H1N1’s infection fatality rate would probably be comparable to COVID-19’s fatality rate. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 could even be less than 0.1% once the outbreak subsides and accurate number of infections and fatalities are correctly known.

Even the most accurate COVID-19 test RT-PCR only has an accuracy level of 50-60%, especially in asymptomatic individuals or if the virus has penetrated deep into respiratory tract. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, RT-PCR (viral testing), is considered the gold standard of diagnosis for COVID-19 and other viruses. Although it has high sensitivity and specificity in a laboratory setting, chances of finding virus in specimens are: 90% in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, 70% in sputum and 50-60% in nasal swabs, though used most frequently.

If extensive sero-epidemiological studies are done, it would be found out that actual prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than 25 million reported infections, perhaps comparable to H1N1 swine flu’s 700 million to 1.4 billion world-wide infections.

At the peak of the outbreak in March and April, Italian doctors reported the actual number of cases could be as high as 6,50,000, particularly in the worst-hit Lombardy and Milan regions, though total cases in Italy until August are still reported to be only 2,67,000.

Similarly, Iranian epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi recently said: “About 15 million Iranians may have experienced being infected with this virus since the outbreak began.” That amounts to 1 in 5 Iranians or 20% of Iran’s population.

Coronavirus may have infected ten times more Americans than reported, according to a report [2] by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thus, the actual number of infections in the US as well as Europe could be ten to twenty times higher than the official statistics, which is enough for the viral infection to reach endemic steady state and for the population to develop herd immunity against the contagion.

An extensive study [3] in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies, which means number of infections is ten times higher than reported 4,40,000 cases. People in urban areas have up to 10% prevalence of antibodies.

Though widely believed to have originated in Wuhan in January, the exact date and place of origin of SARS-CoV-2 are also doubtful. A Spanish research team found [4] traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample whereas the outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020. In fact, several Chinese diplomats recently cast doubts over the widely accepted theory that the flu virus mutated by consuming bats in wet markets of China.

Coronavirus outbreak is fundamentally the failing of highly commercialized medical science. Billions of dollars are invested in Big Pharma. But for what purpose, to make skin care products and aphrodisiacs, for performing needless cosmetic surgeries; and hundreds of billions are spent on manufacturing state-of-the-art weapon system as deterrence against adversaries. Yet no preparations were made for dealing with a contingency as catastrophic as a pandemic. That’s criminal negligence, and we have nobody to blame but the capitalist social order and commercialization of essential public services.

Even though corporate media promptly declared Trump’s “drug of choice” antimalarial chloroquine for treating a viral infection to be a hoax, its own prescriptions fared no better than placebos. For instance, dexamethasone would be as effective against coronavirus infections as it is in treating arthritis. Competent orthopedics seldom prescribe it because it’s a steroidal drug having more adverse effects than therapeutic ones. Apparently, the manufacturers of remdesivir and dexamethasone in Big Pharma paid millions of dollars bribes to the mainstream media to market the drugs, which in turn is inclined to sensationalize any news story pertaining to COVID-19.

The only remedy that has proved effective in treating COVID-19 thus far has been convalescent plasma therapy. Plasma therapy works on the principle that antibodies contained in the blood of previously infected person would provide resistance against infection through transfusion of convalescent plasma into a COVID-19 patient’s circulatory system.

Thus, it basically works on the same principle that vaccination does, though plasma therapy would be classified as therapeutic vaccine instead of more common prophylactic ones for treating widespread epidemics. A word of caution, though, it should only be used in severe cases of COVID-19 as prescribed by physicians. Because the treatment is still in experimental stages and antibodies could prove potentially harmful in patients with mild symptoms of the disease.

Globally, the leading causes of 56 million deaths every year are: 15 million deaths from heart diseases and strokes; 5 million from lung diseases; 2 million from dementias; 1.5 million from diabetes; over a million each from diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS; and 1.5 million deaths in road traffic accidents. In comparison, coronavirus pandemic has claimed less than a million lives thus far but is getting undue media coverage due to politicization of the pandemic debate.

Footnotes:

[1] H1N1 swine flu caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm

[2] Coronavirus may have infected 10 times more Americans than reported, CDC says:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases-idUSKBN23W2PU

[3] An extensive study in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/index.html

[4] A Spanish research team found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ

Was Qassem Soleimani Killed to Avenge Saudi Oil Installations Attack?

A joint American-Israeli program [1], involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early this year when commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport on January 3.

As the US presidential race is heating up, the pace and sophistication of subversive attacks in Iran is picking up simultaneously. Since June, “mysterious explosions” were reported at a missile and explosives storage facility at Parchin military base on June 26, at power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, a “mysterious fire” at Bushehr port on July 15 destroying seven ships, and a massive explosion at the Natanz nuclear site on July 2 that has reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.

Besides whipping up nationalist sentiment among America’s conservative electorate on the eve of US presidential election slated for November, another purpose of the subversive attacks appears to be to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and Iran to the brink of full-scale war in September last year.

In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of the UAE in May last year and the subsequent downing of the US surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14 was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional clients. That the UAE had forewarning about imminent attacks is proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to man the UAE’s territorial borders.

Nevertheless, a puerile prank like planting limpet mines on oil tankers can be overlooked but major provocations like downing a $200-million Global Hawk surveillance aircraft and mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks could have had serious repercussions.

The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production. The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within days after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

Not surprisingly, more than 35,000 American troops have currently been deployed in the military bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which states: “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran.

The last year’s acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions against Russia.

The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Assad government.

With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.

Notwithstanding, following the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, orchestrated protests erupted in Iran-allied countries Lebanon and Iraq from October to December last year.

Lebanese American journalist Rania Khalek has documented for The Gray Zone [2] the US-backed political forces spearheaded the “color revolution” in Lebanon, where Iran-backed resistance group Hezbollah was part of the coalition government. Following the massive explosion at the Beirut Port on August 4 killing 180 people and wounding nearly 6,000, the shaky, six-month-long coalition government of Hassan al-Diab resigned on August 10.

Similarly, Iraq has been through the US occupation from 2003 to 2011 and is known to have US sympathizers in the Kurdish-held north and the Shia-majority south of the country, where the Western oil majors operate and dispense largesse among local chieftains of myriad clans and tribes.

Using the patronage network, the US successfully ousted former Prime Minister of Iraq Haider al-Abadi and appointed American stooge Mustafa al-Kadhimi in his stead in May. The purpose of destabilizing governments in Iran-allied countries obviously was to deter Iran from mounting subversive attacks in strategically important Persian Gulf.

Unlike Lebanon and Iraq, though, Iran itself is immune to foreign-backed political demonstrations as it does not have any imperialist collaborators on the ground, besides a fringe militant group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) funded by the US, France and Israel, though it did witness large-scale protests in November last year.

The proximate cause of the November 15 protests in Iran was steep rise in petrol prices by the Rouhani government, dubbed as “sabotage” by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The worst-hit region was Khuzestan province in southwest Iran which is home to large Arab minority known to have grievances against Tehran and susceptible to infiltration by imperialist stooges.

 Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport on January 3. Soleimani was the trusted lieutenant of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the main liaison with Russia. Not only did he instigate Russia to strike at Washington’s Achilles heel in Syria’s proxy war but he was also the main architect of the audacious September 14 attacks at Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Alongside deploying several thousand American troops and additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, Washington also took out its most fearsome nemesis General Soleimani in January, and now it can freely stage subversive attacks in Iran and allied countries without the fear of reprisals.

It’s pertinent to note that Trump initially rejected [3] the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani on December 28 due to the fear of full-scale confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on an Iran-backed militia group in Iraq instead. But after the rocket attack at the US embassy in Baghdad by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the powerful national security bureaucracies of Pentagon and the State Department, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.

Footnotes:

[1] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-trump.html

[2] US-backed parties have infiltrated Lebanon’s protests:

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/11/us-parties-lebanon-protests-pushing-country-war-roadblocks/

 [3] Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html

Was Beirut Explosion Handiwork of Israel Following Natanz Attack?

A massive explosion rocked the Beirut Port on Tuesday, August 4, killing 100 people and injuring nearly 4,000. Although the blast occurred in a storage facility containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, used in fertilizers and bombs, stored in the warehouse since 2013, a subversive attack cannot be ruled out, considering that regional spy agencies and their moles were well aware that highly explosive material was stored in the unguarded facility for nearly seven years.

In fact, US President Donald Trump has described the explosion [1] as a “bomb attack.” In an opening statement at a news conference, Trump expressed solidarity with the people of Lebanon, and said: "We will be there to help. It looks like a terrible attack." When pressed by reporters about characterizing the incident as an "attack", Trump stood by his statement, saying US generals believe the explosion was caused by a "bomb of some kind."

Although Trump was likely pointing out the “bomb attack” was a handiwork of Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, the fact is a joint American-Israeli program [2], involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early this year when commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport in January.

As the US presidential race is heating up, the pace and sophistication of subversive attacks in Iran and Iran-aligned countries, including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, is picking up simultaneously. Since June, “mysterious explosions” were reported in a missile and explosives storage facility near a military base in Parchin, east of the capital Tehran, in power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, and the Natanz nuclear site on July 2 that has reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.

Besides whipping up nationalist sentiment among America’s conservative electorate on the eve of US presidential election slated for November, another purpose of the subversive attacks appears to be to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Middle East that brought the US and Iran to the brink of full-scale war last year.

In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of the UAE in May last year and the subsequent downing of the US surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14 was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional clients. That the UAE had forewarning about imminent attacks is proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to man the UAE’s territorial borders.

Nevertheless, a puerile prank like planting limpet mines on oil tankers can be overlooked but major provocations like downing a $200-million Global Hawk surveillance aircraft and mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks could have had serious repercussions.

The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production. The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within days after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks from a major power that equals Washington’s military might, such confrontation would have amounted to a suicidal approach. Therefore, the last year’s acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions against Russia.

The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Assad government.

With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.

Moreover, several momentous events have taken place in the Syrian theater of proxy war and on the global stage that have further exacerbated the New Cold War between Moscow and Washington:

On February 7, 2018, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria that reportedly [3] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute carnage, and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost throughout its more than two-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.

In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok.

Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.

Nevertheless, the motive that prompted the Vladimir Putin-led government to escalate the conflict with the Western powers was that the Russian presidential elections were slated for March 18, 2018, which Putin was poised to win anyway but he won a resounding electoral victory with 77% vote by whipping up chauvinism of the Russian electorate after the war of words with the Western powers.

In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats and the Trump administration ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The relations between Moscow and Western powers reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.

A month later, an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018, and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in Syria on April 14, 2018, in collaboration with the Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France. The strike took place little over a year after a similar cruise missile strike on al-Shayrat airfield on April 6, 2017, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, though both cruise missile strikes were nothing more than a show of force.

But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in the April 14, 2018, strikes against a military research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircrafts demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western powers against Russia in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in the UK a month earlier.

Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport in January. He was the main liaison between Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Kremlin. Not only did he invite Russia to strike at Washington’s Achilles heel in Syria’s proxy war but he was also the main architect of the audacious September 14 attacks at Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Alongside deploying several thousand American troops and additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, Washington also took out its most fearsome nemesis General Soleimani in January, and now it can freely stage subversive attacks in Iran and its allies without the fear of reprisals.

It’s worth pointing out that Trump initially rejected [4] the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani on December 28 due to the fear of full-scale confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on an Iran-backed militia group in Iraq instead. But after the attack at the US embassy in Baghdad by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the Pentagon and the State Department, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.

Footnotes:

[1] Trump says Beirut explosion was an 'attack':

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/beirut-explosion-trump-says-attack-no-evidence

[2] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-trump.html

[3] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-casualtie/russian-toll-in-syria-battle-was-300-killed-and-wounded-sources-idUKKCN1FZ2EI

[4] Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html

CIA was Aiding Jihadists before the Soviets Invaded Afghanistan

Ayub Khan and John F. Kennedy.

During the Soviet-Afghan conflict from 1979 to 1988 between the capitalist and communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab States took the side of the former because the Soviet Union and the Central Asian states produced more energy and consumed less. Thus, the Soviet bloc was the net exporter of energy, whereas the capitalist bloc led by Washington was the net importer of energy.

It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the capitalist bloc. Now the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy, but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized world was predicated upon the economic interests of the Gulf states, which was given a religious color of purportedly “anticommunist” Islamist ideology by the Salafist preachers of Saudi Arabia.

All the celebrity terrorists, whose names are now heard in the mainstream media every day, were the spawns of the Soviet-Afghan War: including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, the Haqqanis, the Taliban, the Hekmatyars etc. But that war wasn’t limited only to Afghanistan. The alliance between the Western powers and their regional client states during the Cold War funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Islamic jihadists all over the Islamic World. We hear the names of jihadist groups operating in regions as far afield as the Central Asian States, the North Caucasus and even in Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January, as reported [1] by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview [2] to The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947 as a former colony of the British Empire. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Historically, Pakistan’s military first used the Islamists of Jamaat-e-Islami as proxies during the Bangladesh war of liberation in the late 1960s against the Bangladeshi nationalist Mukti Bahini liberation movement of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman – the father of current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and the founder of Bangladesh, which was then a province of Pakistan and known as East Pakistan before the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a far-right Islamist movement in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – analogous to the Muslim Brotherhood political party in Egypt and Turkey – several of whose leaders have recently been imprisoned and executed by the Bangladeshi nationalist government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed for committing massacres of Bangladeshi civilians on the orders of Pakistan’s military during the Bangladesh war of liberation.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamist insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Soviet Central Asian States, and even in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

Regarding the Kashmir dispute, there can be no two views that the right of self-determination of Kashmiris must be respected in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions on the right of plebiscite to the Kashmiri people, and the international community must lend its moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people. But at the same time, the militarization of any dispute, including Kashmir, must be avoided due to human suffering that militancy and wars anywhere in the world inevitably entail.

The insurgency in Kashmir erupted in the fateful year 1984 of the Orwellian-fame when the Indian armed forces surreptitiously occupied the whole of Siachen glacier, including the un-demarcated Pakistani portion, on the Pakistan-India border in Kashmir.

Now, we must keep the backdrop in mind: those were the heydays of the Cold War and Pakistan army’s proxies, the Afghan jihadists, were triumphantly waging a guerrilla warfare during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, and the morale of Pakistan’s military's top brass was touching the sky.

In addition, Pakistan’s security establishment wanted to inflict damage to the Indian armed forces to exact revenge for the dismemberment of Pakistan at the hands of India during the Bangladesh War of 1971, when India provided support to Bangladeshi nationalists and took 90,000 Pakistani soldiers as prisoners of war after Pakistan’s defeat in the Bangladesh war of liberation.

All the military’s top brass had to do was to divert a fraction of its Afghan jihadist proxies toward the Indian-administered Kashmir to kindle the fires of insurgency. Pakistan’s security agencies began sending jihadists experienced in the Afghan asymmetric warfare across the border to the Indian-administered Kashmir in the late 1980s; and by the early 1990s, the Islamist insurgency had engulfed the whole of Jammu and Kashmir region.

Footnotes:

[1] CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in 1979:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/07/history-trump-cia-was-arming-afghan-rebels-before-soviets-invaded/

[2] Brzezinski Interview: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen:

https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/

Politics Behind the Sunni-Shia Conflict in the Middle East

Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have ignited the flames of internecine conflict in the Islamic world.

Some self-anointed “Arabists” of the mainstream media posit that the division goes all the way back to the founding of Islam, 1400 years ago, and contend that the conflict emerged during the reign of the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib, in the seventh century A.D.

One wonders what would be the American-led war on terror’s explanation of such “erudite” historians of Islam – that the cause of “the clash of civilizations” between Christians and Muslims can be found in the Crusades when Richard the Lionheart and Saladin were skirmishing in the Levant and exchanging courtesies at the same time.

Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and Iran for regional dominance which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity.

Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-led Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003.

The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni Arab bulwark against Iran’s meddling in the Arab world. But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003 and subsequently when elections were held in Iraq which were swept by Shi’a-dominated parties, Iraq has now been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

Moreover, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration took advantage of the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq and used the Kurds and Shi’as against the Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. And during the occupation years from 2003 to 2011, the once dominant Sunni minority was politically marginalized which further exacerbated the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq.

The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iran’s encroachment on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against the Shi’a-led Syrian government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf states along with their regional Sunni allies, Turkey and Jordan, and the Western patrons gradually militarized the protests to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis.

Reportedly, Syria's pro-Assad militias are comprised of local militiamen as well as Shi’a foreign fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and even the Hazara Shi’as from as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan. And similarly, Sunni jihadists from all over the region have also been flocking to the Syrian battlefield for the last eight years.

A full-scale Sunni-Shi’a war has been going on in Syria, Iraq and Yemen which will obviously have its repercussions all over the Islamic world where Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in relative peace for centuries.

Notwithstanding, in order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on their present policy, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the creation of the Islamic State, for instance, the US policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalized the Iraqi society, exacerbated sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy-handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-led Iraqi government.

Similarly, the war on terror era political commentators also “generously” accept the fact that the Cold War-era policy of nurturing al-Qaeda and myriads of Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The mainstream media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of the Islamic State and myriads of other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the Republican Bush administration as it has been the legacy of the Democratic Obama administration that funded, armed, trained and internationally legitimized the Sunni militants against the Shi’a-led Syrian government since 2011-onward in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region.

In fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq was the Obama administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

The border between Syria and Iraq is highly porous and poorly guarded. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Syrian government was bound to have its blowback in Iraq sooner or later. Therefore, as soon as the Islamic State consolidated its gains in Syria, it overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Apart from Syria and Iraq, two other flashpoints of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region are Bahrain and Yemen. When peaceful protests broke out against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain by the Shi’a majority population in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia sent thousands of troops across the border to quell the uprising.

Similarly, when the Iran-backed Houthis, which is also an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, overran Sana’a in September 2014, Saudi Arabia and UAE mounted another ill-conceived Sunni-led offensive against the Houthi militia in Yemen in March 2015.

The nature of the conflict in Yemen is sectarian to an extent that last year, the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda’s leader Qasim al-Raymi claimed that al-Qaeda had been fighting hand in hand with the Saudi-led alliance against the Iran-backed rebels for the last three years.

The revelation hardly comes as a surprise, though, because after all al-Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, al-Nusra Front, has also been fighting hand in glove with the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition against the Syrian government for the last eight years of the Syrian proxy war.

Furthermore, according to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, 509 Shi’a Muslims belonging to the Hazara ethnic group had been killed in Pakistan’s western city of Quetta since 2013. Although a southern Punjab-based sectarian militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi frequently claims responsibility for the massacre of Hazaras in Quetta, such claims are often misleading.

The hub of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s power mostly lies in Punjab whereas the Balochistan province’s provincial metropolis Quetta, which is almost three-hour drive from the Af-Pak border at Chaman, is regarded as the center of Taliban’s activities.

After the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 with the help of the Northern Alliance, the top leadership of the Taliban has mostly settled in Quetta and its adjoining rural areas and Afghan refugee camps, hence it is called the Quetta Shura Taliban.

In order to understand the casus belli of the Taliban-Hazara conflict, it’s worth noting that the leadership of the Hazara ethnic group has always taken the side of the Tajik and Uzbek-led Northern Alliance against the Pashtun-led Taliban.

The Taliban has committed several massacres of the Hazara people in Afghanistan, particularly following the 1997 massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners by the Uzbek warlord Abdul Malik Pahlawan in Mazar-i-Sharif thousands of Hazaras were massacred by the Taliban in the same city in August 1998 for betraying the Taliban.

The Hazara people are an ethnically Uzbek, Dari (Afghan Persian)-speaking ethnic group native to the Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan but roughly 600,000 Hazaras also live in Quetta, Pakistan. Although the conflict between the Taliban and Hazaras might appear religious and sectarian, the real reasons of the conflict are political in nature, as I have already described.

Now, when the fire of inter-sectarian strife is burning on several different fronts in the Middle East and the Sunni and Shi’a communities are witnessing a merciless slaughter of their brethren in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it would be preposterous to look for the causes of the conflict in theology and medieval history. If the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how come they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?

Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the phenomena of Islamic radicalism, jihadism and consequent Sunni-Shi’a conflict are only as old as the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s when the Western powers with the help of their regional allies trained and armed Afghan jihadists to battle the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

More significantly, however, the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 between the Sunni and Baathist-led Iraq and the Shi’a-led Iran after the 1979 Khomeini revolution engendered acrimony and hostility between the Sunni and Shi’a communities of the region for the first time in modern history.

And finally, the conflict has been further exacerbated in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 when the Western powers and their regional client states once again took advantage of the opportunity and nurtured militants against the Arab nationalist Gaddafi government in Libya and the Baathist-led Assad administration in Syria.