While former president Bill Clinton last night spun a web of fabrications about his wife Hillary’s progressive “accomplishments” as First Lady, senator and secretary of state in a featured speech to an embarrassingly depleted audience in the Wells Fargo Center where the Democratic Convention was being held, an impromptu demonstration outside on Broad Street by protesters from Bernie or Bust and Black Lives Matter was listening to Dr. Jill Stein, the likely presidential candidate of the Green Party, calling for them to continue their movement by backing her third party bid.

The protest action really began in the late afternoon when, at the end of a roll-call vote of delegates from all 57 primary states and territories which formally nominated Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee. As Bernie Sanders was completing his surrender to Clinton by having his Vermont delegation offer their votes to Clinton, some 750 of his nearly 1850 delegates were staging a walkout from the convention hall. Several hundred occupied the convention press tent. Others went out on the street, with most heading up to City Hall, where many of them joined Bernie or Bust activists to announce that they were not supporting Clinton.

The corporate media couldn’t seem to get its story straight on the walk-out, which caught many lazy reporters by surprise, though anyone talking with Sanders delegates on Monday would have known the idea was being worked out of a mass walkout. The NY Times and other pro-Hillary news organizations talked of “dozens” of delegates walking out, though hundreds filled the press tent alone and hundreds more just left the convention “green zone” altogether.

Some of the walk-out delegates then drifted back down toward the Wells Fargo Center and FDR Park, where a loud, energetic protest was held outside the fenced-in and heavily guarded convention site. There was reportedly some police use of teargas to break up the protest outside the gate to the convention, and a few incidents of people trying to climb the fence — part of a four-mile exclusion perimeter set up by convention organizers, the city and the Secret Service — the protest morphed into a march up the wide Broad Street roadway towards a waiting line of Philadelphia Police. The cops had been arrayed so as to block marchers from moving further uptown. As the protesters, bearing home-made signs that said things like “Jill not Hill” and “DNC Corrupt,” pressed in towards the massed cops, and the scene started becoming increasingly tense, suddenly a second large march, this featuring the Black Lives Matter movement, appeared, marching down Broad street from the north.

The police, finding themselves effectively surrounded by converging marchers coming from in front of and behind their suddenly thin-looking line, fell back, allowing the two groups to merge. After a brief moment of confusion and indecision, the whole combined march opted to proceed in the direction of the Black Lives Matter protesters, heading back down to the outside of the Wells Fargo Center.

When we all arrived back where we had started, blocked by the convention’s security fencing (how ironic that Democrats, who have been decrying Donald Trump’s call for a “beautiful wall” at the Mexican border, chose to wall off their convention from the public!), we found Green Party presidential hopeful Jill Stein at the entrance giving a press interview. Cries of “Jill Stein is here!” spread through the length of the march, causing people to press forward in an attempt to hear the Green Party’s likely presidential candidate (the Green Party’s nominating convention is set for next week in Houston).

On learning of her presence, people began excitedly shouting :Jill not Hill!” and “We love you Jill!” so loudly that she could not be heard. People began shouting for silence but to no avail. Then one woman, harking back to the days of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, yelled out “Mike Check!” Immediately others picked up the cry, and within less than a minute there was silence. Some marcher with a large battery-powered megaphone passed it up over the heads of the crowd to Stein, who was accompanied by anti-poverty and Green Party activist Cheri Honkala, and Stein gave an impromptu speech.

The Green leader repeatedly thanked the assembled Sanders delegates and backers for “starting this revolution and refusing to let it die.” She called on them to move to the Green Party to continue their struggle, saying, “We’re standing up to say we demand living-wage jobs. We deserve an emergency jobs program and a Green New Deal to create 20 million new jobs and give the US 100% renewable energy by 2030.” She also called for free public higher education for all and added, to loud cheering, “We need to bail out the students like we did for the crooked Wall Street banks!”

Moving beyond the Sanders campaign, which sidestepped the issue of military spending, Stein said, “Foreign policy should be based on international law,” adding that current US foreign policy, based upon wars and threats of wars, is “nothing more than a marketing strategy for the weapons industry.” She said the hundreds of billions of dollars a year wasted on military spending should be instead “spent at home” on meeting human needs, including erasing the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student debt for higher education. Stein noted that 42 million Americans are saddled with debt for college and that if they all voted for the Green Party and its debt forgiveness program, “We would win this election.”

She concluded, “We should not allow Donald Trump to win the election, but we should not allow Hillary Clinton to win it either. Democracy needs a moral compass. Enough of lesser-evil voting. Fight for the greater good!: Don’t let them tell you for a minute that we are an irrelevant footnote! We have the votes to win!”

Stein and Honkala joined the mass of protesters and Bernie delegate walk-outs as the march moved up to the main gate to the fenced-in sports arena district containing the Wells Fargo Center convention. Although the short, slightly-built Stein was almost lost in the crush of the crowd, she seemed remarkably at ease in the mass of protesters, taking time to converse with those she passed and shaking hands. At the gate, behind which stood a menacing-looking line of Pennsylvania State Police all decked out in full black riot gear with face plates and gas masks and carrying big batons, Stein gave another version of her speech.

Drifting back uptown as Bill Clinton’s speech to the remaining delegates in the convention center dragged on, some Bernie Sanders delegates heading back to their hotels announced that they would be switching their support to Stein, and said they had tossed their delegate passes, apparently having no more interest in attending the final two days of the Democratic Convention, which will feature Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech.

“I got to cast my vote for Bernie for president,” said one Bernie delegate from Florida. “That was all I wanted to be able to do. I tossed my delegate credentials over the fence. I’m done.”

As law enforcement agencies, community organizations, and public health officials work to develop effective crime-prevention strategies, new research from the University of Iowa finds that individuals who report being victims of crime to police are less likely to become future victims of crime than those who do not report their initial experiences.

The UI study examined a nationwide cohort of more than 18,000 people who were victims of crimes such as interpersonal violence–including sexual assault, robbery, threatened rape and threatened assault–and property crimes like theft and burglary. Data were drawn from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a database of non-fatal crime reports, and covered a period from 2008 to 2012.

Overall, the study found that those who filed police reports about their initial experience were 22 percent less likely to experience repeat victimization. Future interpersonal violence victimizations were 20 percent lower, and future thefts were 27 percent lower. Future burglaries did not decline with police reporting.

The researchers suggested the lower overall rate of future victimization may be attributable to increased awareness of victims, police action, and other services that victims receive after reporting their experience to authorities.

“We know that the role of police in society is to provide safety, and clearly we see that they are succeeding in this role. However, they cannot be successful without cooperation from the victims and community. That’s why it is important to report the victimizations to police,” said Shabbar I. Ranapurwala, lead author of the study and postdoctoral research scholar at the UI Injury Prevention Research Center.

The research team also included Mark Berg, associate professor in the UI Department of Sociology, and Carri Casteel, associate professor in the UI Department of Occupational and Environmental Health. The study was published online July 28 in the journal PLOS ONE.

According to national estimates, approximately 54 percent of violent victimizations are not reported to the police. In the population studied by UI researchers, 59 percent of crime victims did not report their initial victimization to police.

Initial victimization was reported to the police more often by females (41.8%) than males (39.9%), by African Americans (44.2%) more often than whites (40.6%), and by non-Hispanics (41.6%) more than Hispanics (36.7%). The most often reported initial victimization was burglary (59.1%), followed by interpersonal violence (51.5%) and theft (34.4%).

Many crimes are not reported to police because of the fear of repercussions or because the crime is considered trivial, the authors said.

“When victimizations are not reported to the police, this creates significant inaccuracies or errors in crime-rate estimates generated from official law enforcement data,” said Berg.

“Victim non-reporting, therefore, has significant consequences for policy,” he added. “For instance, the annual allocation of crime-control resources is partly determined by variations in serious crime rates, information that is based on official data sources.”

The researchers suggest that better understanding of how reporting to police affects future victimization could help law enforcement and other government agencies better engage with victims, particularly those in minority communities, who experience higher rates of victimization. Such engagement can also include linking victims with services (e.g., social, financial, emotional, and legal) offered by local or state government, or by community organizations.

Russia has not yet returned to the Stalinist horrors of 1938 as many fear but rather to those of 1983 when, after 18 years of Brezhnevite stagnation, Yury Andropov, the former head of the KGB who had become general secretary of the CPSU, tried but failed to save the USSR, according to Oleg Kashin.

What is on offer now, the Russian journalist argues, is “not Stalinism but rather a replay of the Andropovshchina, not 1937 but 1983.” Some of the obvious parallels – the Olympics, Afghanistan, and the end of detente — have been noted, he suggests, but there are other less obvious but more important ones (svoboda.mobi/a/27883749.html).

After 18 years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule in which everyone including those at the top of the nomenklatura recognized that the USSR was rotting and that something had to be done, Yuri Andropov came to power, not as a result of some KGB seizure of power but because the party elite knew that someone had to act to avoid a disaster.

But Andropov got sick and so “instead of order,” Kashin says, the country had to watch as its leader went on dialysis. As a result, “the entire Andropov campaign about the struggle with the Brezhnev nomenklatura and its habits should be seen as a prelude to the reanimation procedures Andropov was involved in over the course of his 15 months in power.”

Andropov’s health problems meant that there couldn’t be a real campaign, “only hysterics.” The specific actions, including the arrests in the baths, the retirement of Shchelokov, and the Uzbek affair among others, were not part of some carefully thought out plan but rather actions reflecting the impulses of the leader.

That is because “in agony, no one is all powerful, and already now, more than 30 years later, it is time to recognize that the Andropovshchina was an agony, and that perestroika in its most insane and fantastic manifestations was programmed in precisely when the Andropov Central Committee via the hands of state security tried to bring order to a country beyond help.”

“If one compares all this with present-day Russia, then there is only one principle difference.” Brezhnev hasn’t died, but what Russia has now is “funnier” because Putin, a Soviet man par excellence, combines in himself “Stalinist, Khrushchevite, and Brezhnevite qualities, that is, he is an autocrat, an eccentric and the master of stagnation.”

“Putin as Stalin bombed Chechnya, incarcerated Khodorkovsky, and put off elections. Putin as Khrushchev entertained his subjects via ‘direct lines,’” and by giving the West the finger. And Putin as Brezhnev “made friends with viola players and gymnasts, handed out orders, and did not oppose a cult of personality” or wars in Ukraine and Syria.

If one extends this analogy, Kashin says, then “after Putin-Andropov will come and immediately disappear Putin-Chernenko and after him Putin-Gorbachev, with all the well-known consequences of that. Perhaps this will be put off for some time by a Putin-Putin, but that will bring nothing good to the country.

Russians will be pleased by the punishment of those who flaunt their wealth too much. They will see this as a kind of justice, and Putin can play to that. But, he continues, “a nomenklatura state in which power and the nation exist apart from one another and do not have common interests is condemned to self-destruction.”

And that pattern, Kashin concludes, is “already not a game about historical parallels” but rather “a fundamental principle of the existence of such a state.” At some point, perestroika will come again and when it does “everything will fall apart.” One need not help it or try to prevent it, he says. It is going to happen in any case.

Just when you thought the Trump campaign couldn’t get any stranger…it did.  Russian hackers doing the bidding, either explicitly or implicitly of the Putin government appear to have hacked the Democratic National Committee.  20,000 e mails have been offered to Wikileaks, which has dutifully released them into the public domain, though Julian Assange claims the source isn’t Russian.

So far, the material exposed has proven that the DNC staff, undoubtedly following orders from the boss, Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, had rigged the primary campaign for Hillary Clinton.  But aside from one explicitly offensive e-mail, in which a staffer appeared to believe if the DNC could get Bernie to admit he was an atheist, rather than a practicing Jew, it would scuttle his campaign–there’s been more smoke than fire.

That’s not to say that there might not be more to come.  Likely, whoever hacked the DNC server plays to dish out the material in dribs and drabs like Chinese water torture.  The best (or worst, depending on your perspective) may be yet to come.

We also don’t know the totality of what the Russians hacked.  Did they also gain access to Hillary’s private e-mail server?  The FBI claims this is unlikely, though they concede that the Russians did try (and failed).  But there remains the distinct possibility that this data dump is but the tip of the iceberg.

All this raises a whole host of issues.  Most critical among them is: how could a major American political party do such a terrible job of securing its servers from infiltration?  Buzzfeed’s Sheera Frenkel wrote a piece a few months ago quoting cybersecurity experts warning that both parties had woeful security protections.  The latest Wikileaks e-mails reveals one blundering bloke ridiculing Frenkel for her claims.  Now who looks the fool?

Of course, Wasserman-Schultz had to go.  But she should’ve gone long ago.  The fact that she remained confirms that the primary system was rigged for Hillary.  It also speaks volumes about how a Clinton presidency would behave in similar circumstances: batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, protect our own at whatever cost.  See outsiders, even those in your own party, as the enemy.

The Clinton campaign is trying to turn the scandal into an indictment of the seamy Russian hackers.  They’re circulating incriminating material in the media focussing on Donald Trump’s inside connections to the Kremlin hierarchy.  All this, while not insignificant matters, divert attention from the equally, if not more important issues.  Like: why was the DNC all-in for Hillary when it was supposed to be an honest broker between all the candidates?  Why did DNC staff, including Wasserman-Schultz lie about their allegiances, saying they were not siding with the Clinton campaign?

If I believed that this data dump was the last of it and that there would be no more damaging material emanating either from the DNC or Hillary’s own e-mail servers I might be inclined to let this slide.  If it was a one-off episode it might not make more than a ripple in the overall campaign.  But everyone knows there is more to come.  What it is is an open question.  Is it going to be even more damaging?  Or will it be more like the latest release of DNC voice mail messages asking for Michelle Obama’s office phone number?

Trump continues to astound.  Today, he beseeched those same Russian hackers to gain access to Hillary’s missing 33,000 e-mails and release them to the public as well.  Given that this seems to be one of Trump’s main charges against the Democratic nominee, his request for the assistance of Russian hackers would appear to be a flagrant violation of decades, if not centuries of U.S. election protocol.  That is, our elections are fought domestically.  We don’t brook foreign interference in electoral politics.  There is a proud tradition going all the way back to George Washington’s speech warning against foreign entanglements, that America is fiercely independent and guards its sovereignty jealously.

Presidential candidates simply do not appeal to outside interests to save their campaign.  If they do, their campaigns are sunk.  But as I wrote above, this is a tradition.  And Trump’s campaign is designed to break the mold, perhaps all the molds of presidential politics.

It’s extremely difficult to tell whether Trump’s habit of breaking the china wherever he goes and whatever he says, will cause him to pay a price with the electorate.  So far, he seems far beyond Ronald Reagan’s Teflon president.  Rather, he’s the candidate who succeeds more the worse his mistakes are.  Democrats keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.  When will this election revert to form and when will Trump’s campaign finally fall to earth like a busted balloon.  It may never happen.  And that’s what’s scary.

Not that I’ve changed my mind about Hillary’s candidacy.  I remain as firmly convinced as ever that she is not trustworthy, not progressive, not genuine.  She is a retread who offers us distant memories of a nostalgic past (Bill Clinton’s presidency), which aren’t so splendid.  While Obama was a disappointing president, he did a number of things well.  Not the things that were most important to me.  But things that were important for the nation.  I have no such hopes for Clinton.  None.

The watchword of the Democratic convention is “competent,” as in “Hillary is the most competent candidate.”  If there’s a more boring word in the English language I don’t know it.  At least in the context of a presidential campaign.  Give me dreams, give me hope, give me a vision of a better future.  But competence?  What’s it good for?  What does it even mean?  That the trains will run on time?

While Obama didn’t end the wars he inherited and promised to end, at least he didn’t start any new wars.  I’m convinced that Hillary will pursue military solutions with abandon.  Her belligerent comments about Iran make me fear we might attack it during her term.  If not Iran, then Syria remains a likely second choice.

I’m not even convinced that keeping Trump out of the White House is enough to justify a vote for Hillary.  I’m just sick and tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.  If I felt Hillary was benign, I might see a reason to break down and vote for her.  But I don’t see a Clinton presidency as benign.

This article was published by Tikun Olam

By J Nastranis

In a setback for the Group of Four (G4) countries – India, Japan, Germany and Brazil – a decision on the long-pending issue of UN Security Council reform has been postponed to the forthcoming 71st session of the UN General Assembly which begins on September 13.

Speaking on behalf of the G4, Brazil’s Permanent Representative (PR) to the UN in New York, Antonio de Aguiar Patriota described Security Council reform as one of the most pressing issues still pending on the General Assembly’s agenda – since 1992.

“The longer we postpone a decision on the reform of the Security Council, the greater discredit brought upon the United Nations in its core function of promoting peace and security,” he warned, stressing: “We can no longer go around in circles.”

The 15-nation powerful Security Council comprises five veto wielding permanent members (P5) – the U.S., Russia, China, UK and France – and ten additional members each elected for two years by rotation. The G4 countries wish to join the current P5 as permanent members of the Security Council.

Taking consensus action on July 27, 2016 the General Assembly adopted “an oral decision paving the way for Member States to continue discussions on reforming the Security Council during its seventy-first session”.

The decision contrasted with the one on September 14, 2015, when the General Assembly recorded in the meetings coverage: “To a burst of applause, the General Assembly . . . adopted, without a vote, a text that sets the stage for negotiations on the long-pending issue of Security Council reform during the world body’s seventieth session, with some hailing it as a ‘landmark’ decision, and others calling it technical rather than substantive progress on an issue that most agreed must urgently be resolved.”

The coverage of July 27 meeting said: “In giving effect to that ‘technical rollover’, the Assembly reaffirmed its central role on the issue of Security Council reform, known formally as ‘the question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and other matters related to the Security Council’.”

The Assembly decided, among other things, that its upcoming discussions would build on the positions and proposals made by Member States and reflected in the decision and its annex — circulated on July 31, 2015 — and use the elements of convergence circulated on July 12, 2016 to help inform its future work.

By other terms of the decision, the Assembly further decided to convene the Open-Ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council during its seventy-first session.

Speaking after the action, Sierra Leone’s PR to the UN, Vandi Chidi Minah, delivered a statement on behalf of the Group of African States, saying that the technical rollover “is in the spirit of preserving the unity and mutual trust among the membership” in moving the process of Security Council reform forward.

He recalled that, in a letter dated July 21, 2016, the Group had conveyed to the President of the General Assembly that the “Elements of Convergence” paper presented by the Chair of the intergovernmental negotiations must include all five key issues relating to Security Council reform – categories of membership, the veto question, regional representation, the size of an enlarged Council and its working methods, and the relationship between the Assembly and the Council – in order to ensure a comprehensive record of the discussions among Member States.

However, the paper only addressed two of those five issues, and could not, therefore, be a true basis to inform future intergovernmental negotiations, he pointed out.

“Only by equitable geographical representation and an increase in the Council membership, with the expansion of both the permanent and non-permanent categories, could the organ be made more representative, democratic, accountable, transparent, effective and efficient,” he emphasized.

Brazil’s Patriota emphasized, it was crucial that Member States engage in real, text-based negotiations if the process was to have any meaning. Agreeing with Sierra Leone, he said: “While the elements of convergence on two of the five key issues pertaining to the reform process could be considered useful to the extent that they identified some already-known trends on the positions and proposals of Member States, other important patterns on the remaining three clusters were regrettably not reflected as leading towards convergence.”

It was obvious that a growing majority of Member States supported the Council’s expansion in both membership categories, but that had not been registered in writing, Patriota noted. Member States had also argued that the under-representation of developing countries should be addressed, yet that suggestion had also not been captured.

Italy’s PR to the UN, Inigo Lambertini, speaking for the Uniting for Consensus Group, said that the July 27 decision affirmed that the intergovernmental negotiations constituted a membership-driven process based on the positions and proposals of all Member States.

Their collective goal was comprehensive reform of the Security Council that could gain the widest possible political acceptance by Member States. While the “Elements of Convergence” paper could be useful going forward, since no delegation had rejected its substantive elements, identifying broad convergences among Member States – on the principles and criteria of reform in particular – exemplified the consensual path needed to achieve concrete results, he said.

Jaime Hermida Castillo, Nicaragua’s Permanent Representative, speaking for the “L.69” Group of diverse developing countries, expressed satisfaction that the framework document and its annex, circulated during the Assembly’s sixty-ninth session, would remain the basis for future negotiations on Security Council reform. It was imperative to engage in real, text-based negotiations based on those documents in order to achieve early Council reform, he said.

Kuwait’s PR Mansour Alotaibi, speaking for the Group of Arab States, emphasized that any measure taken in connection with Security Council reform should be supported as widely as possible by Member States. Expressing satisfaction that the debate would continue in the framework of intergovernmental negotiations during the Assembly’s seventy-first session, he said the Group would continue to engage positively in the discussions, with a view to achieving true and comprehensive reform of the Council.

Guyana’s PR George Talbot, speaking for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), welcomed the consensus adoption of the decision, saying it was obvious that much more must be done to make the Security Council “equal to the times in which we live” and “adequate to address the challenges of the future”.

Reform was integral and critical to an effective multilateral system with the United Nations at its core, he emphasized, noting that the progress made during the current session, while limited, was nonetheless important. It was to be hoped that the text circulated on July 31, 2015 and its annex would continue to serve as a firm foundation upon which discussions could continue during the seventy-first session.

Belgium’s PR Benedicte Frankinet, speaking also on behalf of the Netherlands noted that “gradual but real progress” had been made on the issue of Security Council reform, but cautioned that “we still have a long road to travel”. She called upon Member States to redouble their efforts and demonstrate sufficient flexibility in that regard.

Liu Jieyi of China, a permanent Security Council member, said the intergovernmental negotiations should uphold the leadership and ownership of Member States and be based on the ideas of the entire membership.

Recalling past “missteps” in that regard, he said the present session’s “candid and in-depth” discussions had helped to put the negotiations back on the right track, and expressed hope that Member States would meet each other halfway in order to reach the broadest possible consensus on Security Council reform.

Vladimir Safronkov of Russia, also a permanent Security Council member, said the consensus adoption of the decision had helped Member States to avoid drawing a “dividing line” on the issue of Security Council reform.

While they were still far from finding a universal formula to address the issue, its great significance demanded that States seek a solution that would enjoy a greater majority than the formal two thirds required. The discussions should be conducted in a transparent and inclusive manner, without creating artificial timelines, he emphasized.

Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg, who chairs the intergovernmental negotiations, said the 2016 discussions had provided an opportunity to discuss all five key reform issues. On the basis of those meetings, elements of convergence had emerged on two of the five issues – the relationship between the Security Council and the General Assembly, and the size of an enlarged Council and its working methods.

Those elements of convergence, circulated on July 12, 2016 by the Assembly President, would be useful in the negotiations going forward, bearing in mind that Security Council reform would have to be comprehensive, addressing all five key issues. “Much is at stake, but if Member States engage and negotiate in good faith, reform is not impossible,” she said in conclusion.

Variations in the ability of sand particles kicked into the atmosphere from deserts in the Middle East to absorb heat can change the intensity of the Indian Summer Monsoon, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

The research was published July 28 in Scientific Reports, an open access journal from the publishers of Nature.

The Indian monsoon is a period of intense rainfall that more than a billion people rely on to bring rains to farmland. The results of the study could help improve monsoon prediction models, which usually use a constant value for sand particles’ heat-absorbing ability. Because the absorbing ability varies greatly with region and time, assigning a constant heat-absorbing ability for the particles tends to underestimate the impact that absorbed heat can have on the monsoon system, the authors said.

The study was led by Qinjian Jin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who conducted the research while earning his Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences. He collaborated with Zong-Liang Yang, a professor in the Jackson School’s Department of Geological Sciences, and Jiangfeng Wei, a research scientist in the department.

The deserts of the Middle East are a large source of “mineral dust,” small particles of sand that are brought into the atmosphere by wind and thermals. Once in the atmosphere, the dust can heat parts of the atmosphere by absorbing energy from sunlight.

The researchers found that mineral dust that originates in the Middle East can strengthen the Indian Summer Monsoon by heating the atmosphere above the Iranian Plateau and the Arabian Sea. But the dust’s ability to absorb heat affected how much the dust influenced the monsoon. Dust that absorbed heat more efficiently was linked with increases in monsoon rainfall.

“The heating ability of dust aerosols largely determines how the monsoon responds to dust,” Jin said.

The researchers examined the impact of mineral dust on monsoon strength by creating seven high-resolution computer simulations that varied the heat absorption of the mineral dust.

The Indian Summer Monsoon accounts for up to 80 percent of the annual rainfall in the Indian subcontinent. Increasing the strength of the monsoon can lead to flooding that can cause massive losses in life and crops. Jin said that for climate models to accurately capture monsoon behavior, they must account for the variability in mineral dust’s heat absorption.

“This heating is represented in very different ways in different climate models, and is one of the factors responsible for inconsistency of climate model results,” Jin said. “This study addresses the necessity for developing a new method to represent dust heating in climate models.”

While this study focused on mineral dust’s heat-absorption abilities, Jin said he is planning future research on how the dust particles can influence climate by changing cloud formation and behavior.

“Dust particles have been shown to be efficient ice nuclei, which may influence the monsoon by changing clouds’ properties,” Jin said.

Future research also needs to consider other dust processes, such as the surface erodibility of different dust source regions and how dust enters into the atmosphere, both of which have been studied by Yang and his other collaborators.

“Ultimately, this integrated research will improve our understanding of complex dust-monsoon interactions,” Yang said.

Oil prices on Friday remained around April lows as slowing economic growth threatened to worsen ongoing oversupply of crude and refined products, Reuters reported.

International Brent crude oil futures LCOc1 were trading at $42.78 at 0127 GMT (09:27 p.m. EDT), up 8 cents from their previous close. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude CLc1 was at $41.16, up 2 cents.

Brent hit its lowest since April in the previous session, at $42.56, while WTI hit a fresh low of $40.95 per barrel early on Friday, and both crude benchmarks are now down around 20 percent since their last peak in June.

Because of ongoing oversupply, US bank Goldman Sachs (GS.N) said this week that it did not expect a big recovery in prices any time soon.

“We continue to expect that oil prices will remain in a $45 per barrel to $50 per barrel trading range through mid-2017 with near-term risks skewed to the downside,” the bank said.

Despite this, some analysts said recent price falls in oil had been overdone, especially as demand remains strong despite concerns over future economic growth.

“Investors have become overly bearish on oil as US production and gasoline inventories continue to rise. We think those concerns are unwarranted. Underlying demand in the U.S. remains robust,” ANZ bank said.

Dr. Jill Stein, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Green Party, which holds its own nominating convention next week, Aug. 4-6, in Houston, had it right when earlier this year she offered to step aside and let Bernie Sanders, after failing to win the Democratic nomination, come in and head the Green Party ticket, running against Clinton and Trump in the general election.

Had Sanders taken her up on her surprising offer, instead of bowing to the corrupt powers that be in the Democratic National Committee and the oligarchic corporations that are backing Hillary Clinton, and ultimately endorsing Clinton, he could well have outpolled both Clinton and Trump and ended up winning the presidency as a Green partisan. He had a chance, even if he didn’t win, to upend the stifling Democratic/Republican duopoly that has been crushing progressive movements and gutting what’s left of New Deal and Great Society programs for generations, and to create the foundation for a new politics in the US — to give American voters a true choice finally between one or two sclerotic pro-capitalist parties, and, at long last, a genuine people’s party.

Instead of that Hail Mary, Sanders decided to forfeit the game.

Some of his nearly 1900 pledged delegates, either after Tuesday’s roll call voting or on Thursday, when Clinton is nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, will likely stage a walk-out from the Convention Center. Hopefully they, and hundreds of thousands of Sanders activists or the millions of Sanders backers who voted for him in the primaries, or who supported his campaign but were barred from voting in the many closed primaries and caucuses, will decide to walk right into the welcoming arms of the Green Party.

Bob Nelson, a Sanders delegate from Pasadena who is at the convention, says that the California delegation, which includes factions of people including those who say they will in the end stay in the Democratic Party and ultimately will back Clinton (as Sanders is asking them to do, often to loud boos), those who will stay in the Party but who will only support down-ticket candidates but not Clinton, those who will quit the party — perhaps as part of a public walk-out from the convention hall — but who will still vote for Clinton in November so as not to allow Trump to win the state in a close contest, and those who will quit the party entirely, and probably support the Green Party. He predicts that the Green Party and its presidential candidate, and possibly candidates for other state offices, could fare very well in California this year as long as polls show the race Clinton-Trump to be not even close. He notes that the state is overwhelmingly Democratic, and also that more than half the state is people of color and either immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants, meaning Trump is unlikely to do well there. “You could see a significant vote for the Green Party in California this year,” he says. Certainly the level of anger among Sanders delegates at the convention and outside on the street, especially after the Wikileaks release of 20,000 emails showing the blatant, coordinated efforts by the DNC and the Hillary campaign to undermine and destroy Sanders’ primary chances and to manipulate media coverage of his campaign, is unprecedented, and is not likely to go away after the convention is over.

At a breakfast Monday morning of the Florida delegation, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the Florida Congresswoman and Democratic Party Chair outed as an anti-Sanders saboteur by Wikileaks but still scheduled to gavel open the convention that day, was booed so severely by both Clinton and Sanders delegates that she had to leave the room, after which the DNC hastily cancelled her appearance as convention convener, handing it off to a minister (who herself was booed loudly when she ended her ecumenical prayer with a word for Hillary Clinton).

I have no illusions that Stein or another Green candidate will win the election in November, absent the hugely popular Sanders as the standard bearer. There are just too many obstacles to that happening, ranging from a corporate media that will violate all standards of journalistic integrity to avoid reporting at all on the Green campaign and its political positions (which include such radical stances as a slashing the US military budget, self-determination for Palestinians and suspension of foreign aid, including military aid, to Israel as long as it continues occupying Palestinian land, replacement of Obamacare with a single-payer health system like Canada’s, college debt forgiveness, 90% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2050, etc.), an electorate habituated to thinking only in terms of voting for the “lesser evil,” or for a candidate who meets some single standard (black, white, a woman, a “believer,” or some other identity-politics category), and of course money. Sanders as a Green could have probably counted on continuing to garner tens of millions of dollars a month in small donations from his backers as during the primaries, but without him, that is hard to imagine any Green candidate managing to do.

Although it must be noted that since Sanders threw in the towel, Stein’s campaign has reported that donations have jumped an astonishing 1000%, with many contributors giving $27, the symbolic amount favored by the Sanders campaign during the primaries. As of mid-July, the Stein campaign has reported raised over $650,000. That’s a far cry from the tens of millions raised by Sanders in month after month of campaigning, but it’s miles beyond what the Green Party has managed to collect in years past, and will likely continue to climb after the Green Party’s campaign starts in earnest after their convention.

At this point, the Democratic Convention is mostly denouement, with Clinton’s nomination a foregone conclusion, barring a panicky stampede to Sanders by the 500 convention super delegates fearful of a Trump victory over a badly wounded Clinton (highly unlikely). The only other excitement this week would be either some colossal blunder by hubby Bill who is the final speaker Tuesday evening — something that would further inflame Sanders delegates or scandalize more voters (always possible), or a surprisingly large walkout by Sanders delegates (possible too) either Wednesday or Thursday.

What’s needed now is maximum support for the Green Party which needs to rise from 3% to 15% in the polls in order for its candidate — probably Jill Stein — to land a spot in the presidential debates this fall — the one way that her campaign could really become a challenge to the two tottering major parties.

Here in Philadelphia, where we have our own temporary version of Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” with an impenetrable four-mile fence barricading the aptly names Wells Fargo Convention Center and the delegate hotels, and an army of police enforcing separation from the masses — a good indication of the current popularity of what was once considered to be the party of the people, we will celebrate the departure of the corrupt power elite and their latest White House wannabe Hillary Clinton, leaving behind just our own city’s and state’s small-time political con-artists and crooks.

Our city delivered George W. Bush to the country in 2000. Now we’re bequeathing it Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By Jim Garamone

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pushing the boundaries for what his country’s foreign policy is going to be about for the next decade, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs said Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

Elissa Slotkin said she believes Putin is pushing where he thinks there is weakness. “He is pushing to see how far he can get,” she said during a panel discussion with Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi.

Putin is cashing in through his foreign policy on a sense of inferiority that the Russian people feel since the Cold War ended, Slotkin said.

Playing With the Public

“I think Putin is playing on that with the public and his public,” she said, “and I think he is looking for ways to be a global peer competitor with the United States. He wants the image of Russia to be that of a competitor and an equal.”

The Russian leader is doing that in countries bordering Russia – the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and farther afield in Syria and the South China Sea, she said.

The strategy to counter Russia “is not just a bumper sticker,” Slatkin said, adding that in shorthand, it’s called “strong and balanced.”

“The strong means the U.S. and NATO have to have the capabilities that they need in the right places to deter Russia, and we have to support partners … in building their resilience in response to Russia – Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia,” she said.

Balance Means Cooperation

The balanced portion of the strategy relies on the idea that there are still areas where the United States and Russia can cooperate in issues of mutual interest that include the Iran nuclear deal, North Korea and possibly Syria, Slotkin said.

“We don’t want to be adversarial with the Russians,” she said. “That said, we can’t stand aside while they illegally annex places and sow dissent in places and destabilize places. We have to have the twin deter and dialogue message.”

Russian activities in Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia should not be surprising, Slotkin said. “The Russians have had for years a doctrine of what they call active measures of these steps to sow dissent generally either on a specific issue or just to cause political chaos in the political system of a neighbor in order to create and opening for themselves,” she explained.

The Russians certainly are attempting to divide Europe, Slotkin said, because they think it provides an opening for them. “Part of dividing Europe is dividing the views of America and our democracy and whether that is a model to pursue,” she added.

Military Modernization

Russia is pushing boundaries, Slotkin said, and Putin has pushed a significant modernization of the Russian military. The country has been more aggressive in the Arctic, in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and in the region generally, and is developing capabilities in cyber and space and improving its maritime and air capabilities, she said.

“All this leads you down a road to an assessment that Putin has decided to take on a decidedly more aggressive foreign policy,” she added, “and that deeply concerns us.”

This is not a position derived from strength, but from weakness, Slotkin said, and in some ways, that is more worrisome. The combination of sanctions against Russia for its actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, plus the drop in the price of oil, has hurt the nation, she said.

“I therefore think there is heightened interest [among] the political leadership in Russia in talking about conflicts abroad, in championing conflicts abroad,” she said. “That is a tactic we know well from our Cold War history. But the other lesson I hope we’ve learned from our Cold War history is not to overestimate the competitor.”

The South African Police Service is committed to ensuring peaceful local government elections next week on 3 August.

More than 50 000 police officers will be deployed at 22 612 voting stations countrywide as South Africans take to the polls in the 2016 Local Government Elections and elect the leadership of their choice.

Speaking on Thursday at a New Age business briefing, Police Minister Nathi Nhleko reiterated that come next week, there will be zero “no-go areas”.

“Our point of emphasis is that we have to secure the environment to such an extent that communities are able to excise their constitutional right to vote,” Minister Nhleko.

As of June, the police had 1000 voting districts which were classified as high risk areas. This number has since been reduced to 650.

“This tells you that because of our operations, we have been able to reduce the number. I am confident that we will be able to do our bit from the police side,” said Minister Nhleko.

However, he said, the overall success of the election requires all stakeholders in the country to play an active role in ensuring they are peaceful, free and fair.

Acting National Police Commissioner Kgomotso Phahlane echoed these sentiments. He said the success of the police is highly dependent on the collaboration between communities and visible policing.

Regarding the violence in the area of Vuwani, in Limpopo, he assured the residents they will have a platform to vote which will be secured by the police.

“The Vuwani that we have experienced is not going to be repeated. What happened there is unfortunate. We have revised our plans and done the necessary deployment,” said General Phahlane.

He said one of the measures for the Limpopo area included that a number of the new cadets that are graduating today will be deployed in Vuwani.

Regarding the violent protests that broke out in Tshwane, which saw shops being looted and roads being barricaded, Minister Nhleko said the police secured and stabilised the city in 24 hours.

“We can assure that it’s not going to happen again. We are paying specific focus to ensure that people go to the elections freely.”

National Deputy Head for the Hawks Major General Yolisa Matakata said the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation was working on gaining intelligence to ensure safe elections.

“We are working with all the role-players within the police and intelligence community to ensure that we link that information and plan accordingly,” she said.

With regards to the 25 politically-related crimes during the election period, with 14 cases opened for murder and attempted murder, Minister Nhleko said nine suspects have been arrested.

“We continue to follow leads on a number of these particular cases. We are also working with prosecution authorities in fast tracking some of these particular cases.”

He added that the police will continue to do what is necessary to ensure that the matters are resolved.

(Civil.Ge) — Georgia’s central bank cut its key refinancing rate by 25 basis points to 6.75% on July 27.

“The decision is based on a macroeconomic forecast, involving gradual easing of monetary policy for achieving target inflation,” the central bank said. “If there no other factors emerge, the monetary policy rate is expected to be cut to 6% in a mid-term period.”

The central bank said that annual inflation in June slowed more than expected to 1.1%, far below of 2016’s target level of 5%.

It also said that the annual inflation will remain low in “following quarters” and expected to reach the target level by the end of 2017; next year’s inflation target is set at 4%.

NBG started tightening of monetary policy from February 2015 with the key rate gradually increasing in a course of last year from 4% in the beginning of 2015 to 8% by the end of last year. The key rate was remaining unchanged at 8% in the first three months of this year before cutting it to 7.5% in April.

Central bank’s monetary policy committee will hold its next meeting on September 7.

By Milivoje Pantovic

Human right activists on Wednesday said Serbia’s tougher line towards refugees and migrants was creating additional dilemmas.

“The state definitely wants more control, we saw that when they changed their policy on the refugee camps. Now, only those who apply for asylum can enter [Serbia’s] permanent refugee centres,” the director of the Asylum Protection Centre, Rados Djurovic, said.

But he added that recent changes in policy towards refugees would create new logistical problems that will be hard to cope with.

“The status of people who asked for asylum in Serbia and then left for other countries [in the EU] and are deported back from EU to Serbia, is unknown. That will be one of the issues that needs to be solved,” Djurovic told BIRN.

The number of refugees in Serbia has risen steadily since Hungary tightened security on its border with Serbia early in July.

Hungary has now ruled that any migrants or refugees found inside the country, up to eight kilometres from the border, must be sent back to the “transit” zone beyond the Hungarian fence on the Serbian border.

As a measure to stop the increase of refugees in Serbia, the government in Belgrade has sent a joint military and police force to the southern border with Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Since Monday, several hundred migrants and refugees have also been prevented from entering Serbia and returned to Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Reports say those who expressed a wished to seek asylum in Serbia were transported to Serbia’s registration centre in the town of Presevo.

BIRN has also found out that Serbia and Hungary are considering placing asylum seekers who want to continue towards the EU in refugee camps until Hungarian officials allow them to cross that country.

At the moment, Hungary is only letting in 15 refugees per day on two border crossings with Serbia, at Horgos and Kelebija.

State Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs Nenad Ivanisevic said on Wednesday that the refugee “Balkan route” is far from closed and that Serbia needs more help from the EU.

“The situation on the border with Hungary shows that refugees keep coming,” Ivanisevic told the public broadcaster RTS.

“By the end of the week, we will adopt a document on new developments in the refugee crisis and we will call for help from our partners,” Ivanisevic added.

Some 100 refugees who staged a protest march from Belgrade to Horgos on the border with Hungary on Friday are still on a hunger strike, protesting against Hungary’s tough line towards refugees. They are provided with medical help but still refuse food.

“All the refugees on the border have been offered transport to refugees camps and centres but nost of them have refused [to go] since they believe that if they are closer to the border, they will pass somehow,” Ivan Miskovic, from the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration, told BIRN.

“They do not disturb anyone and do not break the laws so the police are letting them stay,” he added.

During the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, about a million refugees crossed Serbia on their way to EU countries. In 2016, so far, some 100,000 refugees and migrants have crossed Serbia on their journey to EU countries.

By Balasubramaniyan Viswanathan

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) has come out with a new message titled “a message to Mujahid nation of Kashmir,” encouraging Kashmiris in India to emulate knife attacks similar to the ones carried out against the Israelis in the Palestine. “Your brothers in Falasteen” AQIS extols, referring to Palestine, “have written new chapters of jihad with decentralized knife attacks on Israelis, what stops you from using a dagger or knife to slit the throats of forces of Kufr?”

This message comes in the wake of widespread protests in Jammu and Kashmir for the past one week as a result of the death of a popular flamboyant militant leader, Burhan Wani belonging to the Hizbul Mujahideen. The mass protests have left 30 dead and hundreds injured; they have witnessed scenes of army camps being attacked by unruly mobs and weapon snatched from army men. All these occurrences have been mentioned in the AQIS statement as well, indicating a possible change in the AQIS strategy while attempting to up the ante in India. It is quite unlike AQIS to come out with statements in real-time; they rarely coincide with the actual incidents that trigger them. This Kashmir-centric message closely follows an earlier statement by AQIS, which, though not incident or region-specific, also has aimed to instigate Indian Muslims. The message titled “No to the slogan of disbelief” was released by the head of AQIS, Moulana Asim Umar.

“Even if you come out with merely knives and sword,” proclaims Moulana Asim Umar in the earlier message, “history bears witness – Hindus cannot withstand you.”

Last week, the United States government listed Moulana Asim Umar as a specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) and Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO). Additional information provided by the US State Department states that the AQIS was involved in the attack on a naval dockyard in Karachi. As highlighted by Geopolitical Monitor earlier this year, the plan was to attack PNS Mehran, a naval base in Karachi and hijack a warship, the PNS Zulfiqur, to target the Indian coastline and also US warships in the Indian Ocean. The US communiqué also blames AQIS for murders including that of a US citizen in Bangladesh. And most importantly, it also points out that Moulana Asim Umar is a former member of the banned Pakistan based, Harkat -ul-Mujahideen.

The US action follows Moulana Asim Umar’s identification as Sanaul Haq last December, when several operatives of AQIS were arrested by Indian intelligence agencies. Haq’s journey to AQIS started from his hometown in Sambhal district in Uttar Pradesh, which is around 150 kilometers from India’s capital Delhi. Armed with a graduation from the famous Dar-ul-Uloom seminary in Deoband in 1991, Haq’s baptism into extremism happened in 1992 after the demolition of Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh before moving to Pakistan in 1995.

According to the Indian Express, Haq joined the Jamia Uloom-e-Islamia-a Karachi seminary that has produced several terrorist leaders such as Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who headed the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and Fazl-ur-Rehman Khalil, the leader of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. After his studies, he joined the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, imparting his teachings at Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania seminary in Peshawar and training jihadists at training camps in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). In 2007, Haq came in contact with Illyas Kashmiri, who had close links to Al Qaeda, and gradually move up the ladder in Al Qaeda.

Now coming back to the messages, these two recent messages which have been released in short rapidity have come a long time after the formation of AQIS by Ayman al Zawahiri in September, 2014. Though there is some conflation on certain aspects between these messages, they are perched diagrammatically at opposing ends on aspects which merit further scrutiny. Firstly, both the messages talk about how gullible Muslim clerics in India have deceived the Muslim masses. By doing so, AQIS is seen attempting to discredit mainstream Muslim organisations which propagate moderate Islamic values in India. Secondly, both the messages advocate lone wolf attacks. While, the Kashmiri message encourages “decentralised” attacks on armed forces using rudimentary tactics such as knifes which have been highly successful in Israel, the other message from Moulana Asim Umar instigates lone wolf attacks on government civil servants and to start riots in turn to cause financial losses.

However, the messages do have some divergent views as well. Firstly, the Kashmiri message provides tactical and operational measures such as using Molotov cocktails (petrol bombs), and measures to reduce the impact of tear gas, etc. This appears to be picked straight out of the Palestine intifada days, where similar tactics were adopted by Palestinians in their struggle against the Israelis. These measures certainly reflect the mindset of AQIS to escalate the conflict to the next level.

On the other hand, the message from Moulana Asim Umar is more of a sermon, attempting to invigorate the Muslim community, but completely bereft of tactical measures. This message mostly dwells on recent issues which have plagued the communal harmony in India such as the anti-Muslim riots and controversies related to chanting nationalistic slogans such as “Band-e-mataram,” meaning “I bow to thee holy mother”; “Jaey mata,” meaning “long live holy mother”; and “Bharat mata ki jai,” meaning “long live holy mother India,” which AQIS considers un-Islamic.

The primary reason for this divergence could be that AQIS perceives the Kashmir theater to be at a slightly advanced stage of the jihadi struggle compared to the pan-Indian jihadi struggle. In fact, AQIS even eulogizes the Kashmiri freedom struggle as a precursor to the Arab Spring, buttressing the thinking that AQIS accords a different treatment for jihad in Kashmir than the rest of India.

Given the disparate yet common threads of these messages, AQIS’ intended objectives here, when seen from the larger organizational perspective, appears to be more internal. They revolve around the group’s own desperation from not being able to make inroads into India, which is further aggravated by rivalries among the jihadi groups. The only known AQIS module was busted by Indian intelligence when 5 operatives of AQIS were arrested in December, 2015. As opposed to this, the Islamic State has been able to make significant inroads in terms of drawing youngsters who either travel to Syria or form localized cells in India which the AQIS has not been able to match. This fledgling competition with Islamic State and dearth of recruits could be the reason as to why AQIS has come out with messages in such rapid succession.

Interestingly, both the AQIS statements aimed at India have come at a time which coincides with a video released by the Islamic State, showing Indian members of the Islamic State in Syria. This release more or less appears as an AQIS effort to “up the ante” against Islamic State. There is a high possibility that the coming days will witness matching messages and responses directed at each other from both these groups. This sibling rivalry is not only bound to push the actual conflict to higher levels but also the “war of ideas,” each propagating their own ideology.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

By Prabha Rao*

Burhan Wani’s death on July 8 occurred just before the elections in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Expectedly, election rhetoric from all concerned political parties, including the ruling Pakistan Muslim League ­Nawaz (PML­N), and the opposition, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and others, contained passionate eulogies for the ‘martyr’ Burhan Wani, and re­runs of the usual Pakistani litany of Indian atrocities and human rights violations in Jammu & Kashmir. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif chaired a cabinet meeting on July 15 in which he declared Pakistan’s unstinting support for the Kashmiris’ “just struggle for self-determination.”1 Interestingly, he announced Islamabad’s intention to observe July 19 as a “Black Day”, which was swiftly postponed to July 21, to coincide with elections in PoK. In a campaign speech in Islamabad, he asserted that Pakistan was and will continue to be a stakeholder in Kashmir, which could not be considered India’s internal matter. Nawaz Sharif was echoed by the Pakistani establishment. Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhary requested the Islamabad-based Ambassadors of the member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir, which comprises Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Niger, to raise their voice against “the blatant human rights violations” of Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley.2 Foreign Affairs Advisor Sartaz Aziz stated on July 25, in reply to Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s statement that Burhan Wani was considered to be a terrorist by India, thus: “Let us not forget, that not long ago the British labelled Indian freedom fighters as traitors and terrorists because at that time India was considered an integral part of the British Empire.”3 While the intention to rile India, especially in international fora, is always an objective with Pakistan, the political mileage that Nawaz Sharif and the PML­N has extracted from this situation in the past two weeks needs to be evaluated and factored.

PML­N swept the polls in PoK, winning 31 of the 41 seats. In his victory speech in Muzaffarabad on July 22, Nawaz Sharif grandiloquently stated that “We await the day of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan.”4 And he added that he was as much a Kashmiri as a Pakistani and promised to work extensively for establishing schools and universities in Azad Kashmir. Sharif, who was under a cloud due to his family connections with shell, front, companies allegedly involved in money laundering, which had been disclosed in the Panama Papers, and under threat from a section of the armed forces and public obliquely supporting Chief of Army Staff, General Raheel Sharif, took the opportunity to proclaim his political relevance and resilience. He and his party adroitly used the media hype generated by the current crisis in Kashmir to portray himself as an indefatigable activist for Kashmiri rights. Consequently, the PPP, which had formed the government in PoK in 2011, managed to get only two seats, with the Muslim Congress getting three seats, the PTI one, the Jammu Kashmir Peoples’ Party (JKPP) one, and another being won by an independent who has affiliated himself with the PML-N.5 Chairman of the PPP, Bilawal Bhutto, had made visits to all the districts of PoK, along with the outgoing Prime Minister of PoK, Choudhary Abdul Majed, but the anti-incumbency factor kicked in to his disadvantage. The dominance of national parties in PoK, as against the hold of regional political parties in the Kashmir Valley in India, has been touted as evidence of the integration of Kashmiris within the Pakistani state.

The Muslim Congress, the oldest party in PoK, has been steadily losing ground. The PML¬-N encouraged factional rifts within the Muslim Conference, which caused a vertical split in the party. As a result of this split, the former PoK Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider established a PML-N chapter in PoK. This move divided the vote bank and severely weakened the Muslim Conference. The remains of the party, led by another ex-Prime Minister, Sardar Atteque Ahamad, had formed a coalition with Imran Khan’s PTI, which latter had also fielded a former PoK Prime Minister, Barrister Sultan Mehmood.6 The significant lack of public response to the PTI, which resulted in a loss even for Barrister Sultan Mehmood, is symptomatic of the party’s and Imran Khan’s waning popularity, which is also evident in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Also, the PPP’s substantial downslide is indicative of its fast diminishing role as an opposition. The Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), which had managed to get two nominees elected in the previous elections, drew a blank in the latest round. This is significant as the number of Kashmiri voters residing in Pakistan is 438,884, mainly in Karachi.7 MQM’s defeat here reveals not only its declining fortunes but also its inability to control the street in Karachi.

It is noteworthy that in the run up to the elections, media bans on the Lashkar-e Taiba/Jama’at ud Dawa were quietly kept in abeyance. JuD Emir, Hafiz Saeed, who has been listed as a terrorist by the UN Security Council’s Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee and has an Interpol Red Corner Notice against him, was permitted to organise a ‘Kashmir Caravan,’ comprising several trucks and buses from Lahore to Islamabad. The ‘Caravan’ passed through the towns of Gujranwala, Jhelum and Gujrat, and organised major rallies that were well attended by federal ministers and religious leaders, garnering a fair amount of coverage in print and airspace. Islamabad’s, and Nawaz Sharif’s, high degree of tolerance for extremist invective can be gauged from Hafiz Sayeed’s claim on July 22 that he had received a call from Asiya Andrabi, the founder of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, begging for his help to resolve the “crisis” on the Indian side of Kashmir. With his characteristic dramatic flourishes, Saeed told the cheering mob “I am telling my sister Asiya – my sister, we are coming. This act of violence will come to end and nobody can stop Kashmir from becoming independent.” Saeed further emphasised that he had received a call from Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in early July, when the latter reportedly told him over phone that it was his desire to talk to the JuD emir, and that then he could face martyrdom! Hafiz Saeed’s statements make it evident that Burhan Wani was in touch with hard-core terrorist elements like the LeT and had established contacts across the border, diminishing his chocolate-box, romantic, image of an idealistic separatist. Hafiz Syed used these rallies to reiterate his and Pakistan’s support for Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s four-point formula on Kashmir and to call for withdrawal of security forces from the Valley8

Earlier, Nawaz Sharif had held a meeting with the Pakistan Parliament Special Committee Chairman and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazal (JUI-F) President Maulana Fazlur Rehman in Lahore, during which Rehman apprised him about his recent talks with separatist leaders over “human rights violations” by the Indian military and paramilitary forces in Jammu and Kashmir. According to Rehman, the separatist leadership in Kashmir was looking towards Pakistan for guidance and succour.5 Like Hafiz Saeed, and other Pakistani leaders, Rehman urged immediate implementation of Syed Geelani’s four point formula on Kashmir.9

The Pakistani leadership, both mainstream and extremist, takes recourse to recommending Geelani’s proposals as they are aware that there will be no meeting point with New Delhi on this issue, and, despite no forward movement in actually ameliorating the situation, Islamabad is able to generate sound bites for the Kashmiri and international consumption. The leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Syed Ali Geelani, has written a letter on July 18 to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and its permanent members – US, UK, China, France and Russia – as well as to the EU, OIC, SAARC countries and ASEAN, apart from separate missives to the heads of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China and Iran outlining his proposal. The proposal, which was a near verbatim rehash of previous demands, proposed that the “controversial status of the Indian-held Kashmir and Kashmiris’ self-determination right should be accepted,” Indian troops from heavily populated areas should be withdrawn, AFSPA and other draconian laws repealed, and political prisoners released. He further demanded that the UN and all international human rights and humanitarian organisations should be allowed to enter and work in the region.10 Geelani, while proactively using the issue of Burhan Wani’s death to whip up anti-India sentiments, has earlier tried to underplay the role that Wani and his band of boys had in instigating and mobilising the youth in Kashmir. He has asserted that his Tehreek-e-Hurriyat was the most representative party in Kashmir, with a clear stand on the freedom struggle of Kashmir. On gauging the reach of the social media-led Hizbul Mujahidin (HM) campaign, Syed Ali Geelani issued special directions to the central as well as district officials of his party to use the first fifteen days of April for a concerted recruitment drive to induct more people, especially youth into the cadre.11

Factors which are being conveniently kept out of the Hurriyat/other separatists’ narrative are the inflexible laws Pakistan has regarding PoK. Pakistan brought out the AJ&K Interim Constitution Act, 1974, which continues to be interim till date. Under Section 4(7) (2) of this Act, “No person or political party in Azad Jammu and Kashmir shall be permitted to propagate against, or take part in activities prejudicial or detrimental to, the ideology of the State’s accession to Pakistan.” Even the oath of PoK’s Prime Minister reads: “As Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, I will be loyal to the country (Pakistan) and the cause of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan.” Political activists who denounce this constitutional gag attract hostile attention and often face prosecution. Using the interim constitution, the political parties of Pakistan extended their reach into PoK, with their baggage of political enmity, and tribal leaders – from Suddhan, Gujjar, Jat and Rajput clans –have been cultivated by them as representative satraps. The Kashmir Council, which was set up as a nodal body under this act, is headed by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, who is termed the chief executive and is more powerful than the legislative assembly, or the Prime Minister (equivalent to a Chief Minister) of PoK. The Chief Secretary reports directly to Islamabad, and political power in Muzaffarabad is illusory.12

Some debates on India’s national television, and in some print media outlets, have focussed on the various shortcomings of the security forces, the advisability of using pellets, the possible use of excess force and concurrent human rights violations in Kashmir. The stark images of injured children need to be seen, not just against the backdrop of khaki, but keeping in view the cynical manipulations of Pakistan. The political reality in PoK is that ‘azadi’ is a chimera, and substantive control of the area is shared between terrorist organisations such as the LeT and HM and the political elite of Islamabad. However, a narrative has been fed in the Kashmir Valley that Pakistan is a more favourable option than India. The victim of this mendacious narrative has been the average Kashmiri.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/elections-in-pok-and-protests-in-kashmir-valley_prao_280716

• 1. Shashank Shantanu, “Pakistan announces “black day “over Kashmir, “don’t interfere in our issue” India hits back,” India Today, July 15, 2016
• 2. “Pakistan briefs OIC, EU on ‘rights abuses’ in Valley,” Greater Kashmir, July 14, 2016
• 3. “Verdict on Future of Kashmir Only By Kashmiri People: Sartaj Aziz,” NDTV, July 25, 2016
• 4. “Success in politics comes through performance: PM to opponents,” GEO News, July 22, 2016
• 5. Tariq Naqash, “PML-N set to form govt in AJK,” July 22, 2016
• 6. Maqsood Muntazer, “Overview of Azad Jammu and Kashmir 2016 Elections,” The Kashmir Walla, June 18, 2016
• 7. “Polling Underway for Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly,” The News, July 21, 2016
• 8. “Hafiz Saeed assures help to ‘sister’ Asiya Andrabi,” WIO News, July 22, 2016
• 9. Prime Minister’s Office, Islamic Republic of Pakistan, “Chairman Special Committee of the Parliament on Kashmir and President JUI-F Maulana Fazlur Rehman called on PM,” July 13, 2016
• 10. “Geelani urges UN and world to intervene Kashmir conflict,” ARY News, July18, 2016
• 11. “Tehreek-e-Hurriyat was formed to counter Musharaf Formula,” Only Kashmir, March 28, 2016
• 12. Nayyar N. Khan, “Vote for Azad Jammu and Kashmir or Pakistan?,” The Kashmir Walla, June18, 2016

A Hindu temple has reportedly been proposed for Nashville in Tennessee by the International Swaminarayan Satsang Organization (ISSO).

According to reports, this proposed 33,000-square-foot and 500-seat temple on 5.8 acres plot is on the August four agenda of Metropolitan Board of Zoning Appeals (MBZA) in Nashville, requesting a special exception to construct. Currently area ISSO followers meet weekly in a rented place.

Meanwhile, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada, commended efforts of temple leaders and area community towards realizing this Hindu temple.

Rajan Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that it was important to pass on Hindu spirituality, concepts and traditions to coming generations amidst so many distractions in the consumerist society and hoped that this temple would help in this direction. Zed stressed that instead of running after materialism; we should focus on inner search and realization of Self and work towards achieving moksh (liberation), which was the goal of Hinduism.

ISSO, established by His Holiness Acharya 1008 Shree Tejendraprasadji Maharaj in North America in 1978, has 16 Shree Swaminarayan Temples in USA, including four in New Jersey alone with Weehawken being the first. Manhar Patel is President of ISSO’s Tennessee chapter.

David Ewing and David Taylor are Chair and Vice-chair respectively of MBZA; while Megan Barry is the Mayor of Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. Nashville, also known as world’s Music City, is the capital of Tennessee.

By Aditi Lalbahadur*

The Zimbabwean state has provided some of the biggest lessons in humility for political analysts in this century. Its government, headed by the indomitable Robert Mugabe, has failed to ‘definitively fail’ despite every warning since ZANU-PF war veterans began the land invasions that prompted the first wave of crisis in that country in 2001.

Zimbabwe has survived world-record-breaking hyperinflation (peaking at 123 million percent in 2008) forcing it to abandon the Zimbabwean Dollar. It out-manoeuvred attempts to dilute its power during the Government of National Unity. An atrophying domestic manufacturing industry and commercial agriculture has not moved it. And when the Western world sought to force its hand by imposing sanctions, it turned the other cheek – East – for succour. Indeed, amidst the chaos and uncertainty that has unfolded across our northern borders, the perverse resilience of the Zimbabwean state has been nothing short of remarkable – but it has come at a significant cost to the political and economic rights and freedoms of its people and regional stability.

Abandoned by capable political opposition, Zimbabwean citizens have turned to other means of expressing their discontent. The #ShutDownZim2016 campaign that has called for a nation-wide boycott to protest the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the country is a non-partisan civil society campaign and has been hailed a true ‘people’s movement’. In spite of the hope that the movement inspires, a nagging concern lingers: How do you convert broad-based social movements into meaningful and sustainable political transformation? The world is replete with examples of popular movements that have failed to convert their ability to overthrow a government into a successful dismantling of the previous regime and its deep-rooted political and economic tentacles. Popular movements often signal the urgency for change; they rarely translate into successful movements in the long run.

To this end, the Arab Spring offers prescient lessons for Zimbabwe. When the Tunisian Revolution spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2010/11, the world hailed it as a triumph for democracy. Barely five years later, the world now speaks of the ’Arab Winter‘. This reflects the failure to maintain and deepen the momentum for reform, with a few arguable exceptions such as Morocco and Tunisia which sought to introduce significant pre-emptive and retro-active reforms. But in other countries, caught up in the euphoria of populist uprising, very little thought was given to a blueprint for what was to follow. The diffuse nature of leadership that is inherent in these movements compounds the challenge to transform attempts into political action, and risk-averse leaders who broker agreements tend to resort to measures that emphasise containment rather than laying the foundations for substantive change.

Zimbabwe’s 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) epitomises this propensity towards containment. On the surface, the GPA appeared to provide a framework for important and necessary reforms. However, the agreement failed to touch on the issue of security sector reform. In Zimbabwe, the securitisation of the state has become a reflex response to quashing dissent and this has resulted in a ‘shadow state’ composed of elites whose survival is disconnected from popular consent. They maintain their monopoly over the levers of power because of the way in which elites have incentivised the political economy of the state. In short, the political allegiance of key individuals in the military has been bought by the illicit trade in diamonds, minerals and land. This patronage filters down to rank-and-file officers, whose wages are always the first to be paid even in times of severe liquidity crisis. Regardless of how widely-known this is, international interventions championed by SADC (and South Africa) were unable to effect a meaningful reform agenda.

The persistence of this kind of ‘deep state’ even in so-called ‘transformed’ societies is exemplified by Egypt. Although the country enjoyed the brief stewardship of a democratically-elected Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, when he signed into effect a constitution that was perceived to endorse Sharia Law, he was swiftly ousted and supplanted by army chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. The kind of hidden power exhibited by the shadow state both stabilises the country by providing the certainty and containment that the world craves, and simultaneously undermines any effort to bring the deep state into the sun.

Worryingly, the pervasiveness of the ‘deep state’ extends beyond a few individuals. It frequently draws on its power to co-opt even new political elites who enter the fray, exposing the limits of popular movements and democratic reforms. Governments overthrown by popular movements are usually followed by elections that pre-suppose electoral competition between a larger group of political elites. Ironically, such elections can simply confirm the status of existing elites.

This conundrum is even more frustrating for the fact that it provides no easy solutions. What we have learnt from the democratisation process of the former Eastern European Bloc, which began so movingly with the peaceful Leipzig Monday prayer vigils gaining scale and momentum in 1989, is that a successful and peaceful transition and democratic reform are rare and difficult, but not impossible. In Germany, it began with a reminder to the DDR government after 40 years of socialist rule that the people had had enough. Despite having absolute control over all the levers of the state and society, the regime was swept aside by peaceful and broad-based citizen protest, a heavily engaged and invested regional and bilateral partner – Western Germany – and a supportive global environment that enabled a lasting transition. However, these political resolutions were not homogenous or without difficulty – in the case of Germany it resulted in the reunification of the country, while Czechoslovakia broke into two and Yugoslavia fractured.

Whatever the way forward, it is clear that we cannot rely solely on grassroots movements like #ShutDownZim2016 to usher in political and economic transformation. Zimbabwe sorely needs a united and capable political opposition movement to carry forward the momentum that this campaign generates. Furthermore, before government can begin to address any of the myriad of social and economic challenges, there must be an honest interrogation of the relationship between the structures of power, the security sector and the political economy of the state.

South Africa and SADC have the potential to facilitate this process – but it will require a shift in their orientation away from the strategy of containment employed in the past. Doing so will acknowledge that it is only in decoupling these parasitic links that one can look forward to a Zimbabwe that is truly prosperous and free and governed in the best interest of all its people. Syria is a jarring reminder of just how bloody the fallout of failure can be.

About the author:
*Aditi Lalbahadur is the programme manager of the Foreign Policy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs. This article first appeared in The Star.

Source:
This article was published by SAIIA

The former US President Ronald Reagan, while deliberating upon the goal of defensive technologies stated “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”

The statement indicated the steadfastness of defense system in order to ensure shelter however the realities have changed after decades about the BMDs in the contemporary environment especially about the South Asian region. The strategic stability of South Asian landscape revolves around the corollary of nuclear deterrence. The stable or unstable deterrence influence the security dilemma, nuclear threshold, regional asymmetry, nuclear employment and peace accordingly. Pakistan and India experienced the effectiveness of nuclear factor and strategic equation in the region. However, few recent developments in the region has put the nuclear optimist assessment about the nuclear weapon’s impressive contribution and impression of deterrence equilibrium in constructing strategic stability, under stress.

The BMD system consists of sensors to detect and track the missile/warhead and a guided missile, called interceptor, to intercept and destroy the incoming enemy ballistic missiles by using the “hit-to-kill,” direct impact technologies—i.e., by “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” In nuclear factor, not the number of nuclear weapons but their credibility and survivability matter unless influenced by other features having direct relevance with deterrence like transition in military doctrines, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) and assured second strike capability. Thus status quo remains stable if strategic equilibrium is in play; the concept of mutual destruction functions and the nuclear opponents has reciprocal annulment of options for war at any level. This piece aims to specifically analyze the recent Indian test of supersonic interceptor missile in pursuit of full-fledged and multi-layered BMD system in a strategic environment which is greatly complex, unstable and unpredictable.

McNamara said, “assured deterrence is the very essence of the whole deterrence concept. We must possess an actual assured destruction capability and that capability must be credible”. Thus, the credibility and capability are keystones of nuclear strategy while it remains fact that rational deterrence rests on mutual vulnerability or mutual assured destruction (MAD). The ‘iron dome’ BMD reduces India’s vulnerability to Pakistani ballistic missiles strike thus challenges the credibility of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. It also undercuts Pakistan’s offensive posture yet strengthens India’s defensive capabilities. However to intact South Asian deterrence equilibrium and strategic stability, strong offense is better than a strong defense in region.

Two interceptor missiles, the Prithivi air defence missile and the Advanced Air Defence (Ashwin) missile are capable of intercepting missiles at altitudes of 50 – 80km and 30kms respectively. India lately successfully test fired the supersonic interceptor missile capable of destroying any incoming ballistic missile. Pragmatically, successful test does not imply effective response in an area of operation because BMD can intercept few incoming missiles but might not defeat all of them. Moreover the BMD system has yet to prove militarily and operationally effective against ballistic missiles.

Missile defense is not completely foolproof and does not provide a complete protection cover. However, this new system added in the military arsenal has the potential to trigger a conflict due to the false sense of security. Arguably it can also facilitate Indian conventional adventurism like Cold Start. The false sense of security can trigger a nuclear conflict despite a functional balance of power or nuclearized environment because the perception to be protected by BMD can convince India to take greater risk that will transform rational actor-model into irrational-actor-model resulting in a major catastrophe.

The worrisome reaction of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment over the introduced of Indian BMD is not naive. It is argued by Pakistani nuclear optimist that Pakistan should consider technical countermeasures to defy the instability and to ensure its capability to hit Indian strategic target. The likelihood of Pakistan to acquire technological or financial assistance for its own BMD system is not viable. Pakistan can acquire BMD from US, Russia and China, with US being the least available option; however the option to produce its own ballistic defense is limited due to economic constraints. Thus resultantly Pakistan would be investing in qualitative and quantitative advancement of missile technologies (i.e. ballistic and cruise). Consequently, Pakistan can develop large number of nuclear warheads, ballistic and cruise missiles. Another effective option would be to pursue Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs). Reportedly, Pakistan developed TNWs in response to BMD.

Pakistan will opt for qualitative and quantitative enhancement of nuclear force thus the introduction of BMD would again contribute to the unhealthy arms race in South Asia.

the Pakistan should also work on the sea based nuclear deterrent to ensure the survivability of its nuclear forces, and to have an assured second-strike capability.

In the words of Stephen D. Weiner, “if the defense system does not have enough interceptors to shoot at all the incoming objects, it must be able to discriminate between decoys (nonthreatening object) and warheads. This discrimination process is not perfect and results in two types of errors: leakage (not shooting at warheads) and false alarms (shooting at decoys).”

There can be several policy options, first is to choose for a mix of qualitative and quantitative improvements to its nuclear force in order to overcome and defeat the Indian defences. An effective option could be to purposely fly the decoys to confuse the defense that in result will exhaust the supply of interceptors. Pakistan can work on penetration capabilities or counter-interceptor missiles to dodge or exploit the weaknesses of the missile defense interception system. For instance, Pakistan can employ ballistic and cruise missiles with stealth technologies to make the warheads undetectable. In addition, the development of supersonic missiles can outdo BMD with its speed and maneuverability.

Since 2008, Wall Street has been a symbol and constant reminder of major wealth and income disparities in America. Yet, Wall Street continues to be a massive industry, serving as a primary source of income for many of the highest earners in the economy.

A recent report by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), published by The Century Foundation’s Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, finds that a financial transaction tax (FTT) can rein in the financial sector and also raise a large amount of revenue.

The report, “Reining in Wall Street to Benefit All Americans: The Case for a Financial Transaction Tax,” finds that an FTT targets an already swelling financial sector, and does not negatively impact individual holders of stock or pension funds, or other institutional investors. Rather, an FTT can make the financial sector more efficient, reducing waste and volatility.

Other key findings in the report include:

• A financial transaction tax could likely raise over $105 billion annually (0.6 percent of GDP) based on 2015 trading volume. This estimate is roughly in the middle of recent estimates that ranged from as high as $580 billion to as low as $30 billion.

• The full amount of this tax would be borne by the financial industry, and not individual holders of stock or pension funds and other institutional investors. Evidence suggests that trading volume is elastic with respect to price, meaning that the drop in trading volume resulting from the tax would reduce costs for end users by a larger amount than the tax would increase them.

• The industry would be no less effective in serving its productive use (allocating capital) after the tax is in place. This means that one of primary effects of the tax would be to reduce waste in the financial sector.

• The revenue raised through an FTT would easily be large enough to cover the cost of many social programs, specifically free college tuition at public institutions.

“Financial transaction taxes raise money by eliminating waste in the financial sector. It’s hard to think of a better tax,” said Dean Baker, author of the report.

In the United States and abroad, there has been growing interest in FTTs both as a source of revenue and as a tool for reining in the financial sector, which would play an important role in reducing income inequality.

By Haizam Amirah-Fernández*

Syria is indeed a European problem, and it shall become increasingly so. The UK’s vote to withdraw from the EU has many and complex causes but it cannot be understood without making reference to the turbulence generated by the Syrian conflict. Two years have sufficed since the Europeans became aware of the ‘refugee crisis’ and since Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the self-proclaimed Islamic State) announced its ‘caliphate’ through terror for the foundations of the European edifice to tremble. And the building’s British storey is on the verge of collapse, thus threatening its entire structural integrity.

The dread of immigration, the rejection of Muslim population, the threat of jihadi terrorism and criticism of the EU for its failure to control its borders are factors that have weighed in the final result of the Brexit referendum. These factors have also been the driving force behind the isolationist campaign promoted by Europhobic, xenophobic and populist leaders. Considering that the difference between the ‘Out’ and ‘In’ was merely 3.8 percentage points, it seems evident that they were essential to tilting the balance towards the option of the UK withdrawing from the EU.

Middle-Eastern conflicts are coming ever closer to Europe. The calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003 flared up a destructive dynamic in a highly flammable region, marked by radicalisation, sectarianism, the banalisation of violence, a regional cold war between Tehran and Ryadh and the displacement of peoples, among others. Nevertheless, it is the conflict that broke out in Syria in 2011 that has had the greatest destructive impact on the populations of the Middle East and, foreseeably, increasingly more on European societies.

Syria is a veritable humanitarian disaster. Five years of conflict unleashed by the brutality of the Assad regime –made more complex by the direct intervention of neighbouring countries and international powers that have nurtured diverse monsters– have led to more than 400,000 dead, 5 million refugees (half of them children) and 8 million internally displaced persons. In other words, it is as if 26 million Spaniards had been forced to flee from their homes in the space of a very few years due to a savage war.

The Syrian conflict has unleashed the greatest cross-border humanitarian crisis the world has seen since the Second World War. It has also spurred the emergence and propagation of Daesh. Most dishearteningly, in the absence of a solution on the horizon, the destabilising effects of the Syrian crisis can only multiply, even for the project of European integration. In the face of these events, the EU has proved to be totally incapable of imposing peace on that part of its immediate neighbourhood. While Europeans –once again– expected a US President to put the Old World in order, instead, Obama’s policy toward the Syrian conflict has been erratic and has merely served to aggravate it.

The fear, anxiety and phobias gripping segments of Western societies are marking the transition to a post-factual world in which facts do not matter that much: a world in which gut feelings feed off and feed back into the narratives of the likes of individuals such as Farage, Trump and Le Pen. The vote for Brexit –despite all warnings about its self-destructive implications– seems to prove it. In the face of the threats emerging from the conflicts in the Middle East and the methods employed by some of their regimes to cling to power indefinitely, isolationism is a temptation that is spreading throughout Western societies as a form of self-defence. The free circulation of persons within the EU’s national borders may well be a further casualty.

To continue practicing ‘ostrichism’ in regards to the Syrian conflict is an option for European leaders who believe they can thereby avoid short-term political risks, but the cost may well be very high indeed for the Union’s citizens who hope for a sound, just and sustainable EU. Or did Europe’s leaders think that the terrible human catastrophes unfolding in Syria and Iraq would resolve of their own accord, or that so much suffering would never affect Europe?

The real time-bomb facing the EU is not the current flood of Syrian and Iraqi refugees, and not even the terrorist acts of criminals who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. The true time-bomb is the relentless destruction of Syria by Assad and the jihadis, given that the country is an epicentre of the quake that is shaking the EU to its foundations. What is highly alarming is that Europe’s ‘seismologists’ do not seem to have located that epicentre, which is the first and vital step to find solutions and prevent greater damages.

About the author:
*Haizam Amirah-Fernández, Senior Analyst for the Mediterranean and the Arab World at the Elcano Royal Institute and Professor of International Relations at the IE Business School, Madrid | @HaizamAmirah

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute

Original version in Spanish: Brexit y la “factura siria” de la UE, published on 30 June 2016 in El Mundo.

It is an indisputable fact that morale and ideology plays an important role in the battle; moreover, we also know that the Takfiri brand of most jihadists, these days, has directly been inspired by the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi ideology of Saudi Arabia, but ideology alone is not sufficient to succeed in the battle.

Looking at Islamic State’s spectacular gains in Syria and Iraq in the last couple of years, a question arises that where does its recruits get all the training and state-of-the-art weapons that are imperative not only for the hit-and-run guerrilla warfare but also for capturing and holding vast swathes of territory?

The Syria experts of the foreign policy think tanks also seem to be quite “worried,” these days, that where do Islamic State’s jihadists get all the sophisticated weapons and especially those fancy white Toyota pick-up trucks mounted with machine guns at the back, colloquially known as “The Technicals” among the jihadists?

I think that I have found the answer to this riddle in an unprecedented December 2013 news report [1] from a website affiliated with the UAE government which supports the Syrian Opposition: it is clearly mentioned that along with AK-47s, RPGs and other military gear, the Saudi regime also provides machine gun-mounted Toyota pick-up trucks to every batch of five jihadists who have completed their training in the training camps located at the border regions of Jordan. Once those militants cross over to Daraa and Quneitra in Syria from the Jordan-Syria border then those Toyota pick-up trucks can easily travel all the way to Raqaa and Deir ez-Zor and thence to Mosul and Anbar in Iraq.

Apart from training and arms which have been provided to the militants in the training camps located on the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with the Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor which has contributed to the spectacular success of Islamic State is that its top cadres are comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers of the Saddam era. According to an informative Associated Press report [2], hundreds of ex-Baathists constitute the top and mid-tier command structure of Islamic State who plan all the operations and direct its military strategy.

While we are on the subject of Islamic State’s weaponry, it is generally claimed by the political commentators of the Western mainstream media that Islamic State came into possession of those sophisticated weapons when it overran Mosul in June 2014 and seized large caches of weapons that were provided to the Iraqi Armed Forces by the Americans during the occupation years.

On logical grounds, however, is it not a bit paradoxical that Islamic State conquered large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq before it overran Mosul, when it supposedly did not had those sophisticated weapons, and after allegedly coming into possession of those weapons it is continuously losing ground? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this simple fact is that Islamic State had those weapons, or equally deadly weapons, before it overran Mosul in June 2014.

More to the point, only thing that differentiates Islamic State from all other insurgent groups is its command structure which is comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that has been provided to all the Sunni Arab militant outfits that are fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

However, a number of Islamic State affiliates have recently sprung up all over the Middle East and North Africa region that have no organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq, such as, the Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan, Libya and even Boko Haram in Nigeria now falls under the umbrella of Islamic State.

It’s understandable for the laymen to conflate such local militant outfits for Islamic State proper but how come the policy analysts of the think tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors, who are fully in the know, have fallen for such a ruse? Can we categorize any ragtag militant outfit as Islamic State merely on the basis of ideological affinity and “a letter of accreditation” from Abu Bakr al Baghdadi without the Islamic State’s Baathist command structure and superior weaponry that has been bankrolled [3] by the Gulf’s petro-dollars?

The Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, deliberately and knowingly falls for such stratagems because it serves the agenda of creating bogeymen after bogeymen to keep the enterprise of Fear Inc. running. Before acknowledging Islamic State’s affiliates in the region, the Western mainstream media also similarly and “naively” acknowledged al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, too, merely on the basis of ideological affinity without any organizational and operational association with al Qaeda Central, such as, al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb.

Notwithstanding, in order to create a semblance of objectivity and impartiality, the American policy makers 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 existing policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the formation of 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 the sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government; similarly, the “war on terror” era political commentators also “generously” accept that the Cold War era policy of nurturing the al Qaeda, Taliban and myriads of other Afghan militant groups against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The corporate media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the formation of 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 previous Bush Administration as it is the outcome of the present policy of Obama Administration in Syria of funding, arming, training and internationally legitimizing the Sunni militants against the Syrian regime 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 Islamic State, al Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab militant groups in Syria and Iraq has been Obama Administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

Notwithstanding, fighting wars through proxies allows the international power brokers the luxury of taking the plea of plausible deniability in their defense and at the same time they can shift all the blame for the wrongdoing on the minor regional players. The culpability of Western powers lies in the fact that because of their self-serving policies, a system of international justice based on sound principles of morality and justice cannot be built on an international stage, in which the violators can be punished for the wrongdoing and the victims of injustice and tyranny can be protected.

Sources and links:
[1] Syrian rebels get arms and advice through secret command center in Amman:

[2] Islamic State’s top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam’s army: http://www.dawn.com/news/1199401/is-top-command-dominated-by-ex-officers-in-saddams-army

[3] Weapons flowing from Eastern Europe to Middle East: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/27/weapons-flowing-eastern-europe-middle-east-revealed-arms-trade-syria