By Steve Herman

The White House unleashed a scathing attack on Donald Trump’s former chief strategist who is quoted as saying he thought it “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for the president’s eldest son and others to meet with Russians during the 2016 election.

President Donald Trump was “furious and disgusted” after reading the comments made by Stephen Bannon in a new book, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Wednesday.

The president, the press secretary and the first lady’s communications director all issued statements during the afternoon blasting Bannon, an influential nationalist who was chief executive of Trump’s campaign in the last three months prior to the 2016 election before taking a senior position in the White House West Wing.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Trump said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

The president, in his statement, declared Bannon is “only in it for himself” and “spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was” at the same time that he had declared war on the media.

Bannon in book

Author Michael Wolff, in his book, quotes Bannon assailing Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner (who is a key White House adviser) and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, for meeting with Russians promising incriminating information about Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The June 2016 meeting inside campaign headquarters at Trump Tower in New York came after the president’s son said he would “love it” if he could acquire damaging material on Clinton.

Trump Jr. subsequently said that the Russian lawyer at the meeting had no such incriminating evidence.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s—, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon said, referring to the top U.S. law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It is a “ridiculous accusation” that the president’s son committed treason, replied Sanders to a reporter’s question.

In the book titled, Fire and Fury, Bannon is also quoted saying that Trump Jr. will “crack like an egg” under the pressure of the investigations into meddling by Russia in the last U.S. presidential election.

Sanders said author Wolff wrote “false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” but she acknowledges the author was allowed to have “dozens of interactions” at the White House since Trump became president.

Bannon, after leaving the White House, remained a staunch Trump supporter, but has failed so far in his political efforts to help insurgent Republican candidates win congressional seats to support Trump’s populist agenda.

“You have a former advisor here who has almost as big as an ego as the president himself,” says presidential historian David Cohen.

Focus on money laundering

Bannon, according to the book, says that the investigative team led by special counsel Robert Mueller, now in the midst of a criminal investigation of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the election, is focusing on money laundering.

“Their path to f—— Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner,” Bannon is quoted saying. “It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

The rupture with the Trump White House makes Bannon a potentially dangerous adversary as he was present at many critical meetings during the campaign and in the White House.

“He knows where the bodies are buried,” Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron (Ohio), tells VOA. “If Bannon is publicly breaking with Trump, who’s to say he’s not going to potentially tell all to the investigators? This could be extremely damaging from a legal perspective to Trump.”

Mueller has already indicted Manafort and another Trump campaign aide, Rick Gates, on money laundering charges linked to their lobbying efforts for Ukraine prior to the 2016 election, and secured guilty pleas from former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to federal agents about their Russia contacts.

Aside from probing Trump campaign links with Russia, Mueller is also investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey, who was heading the agency’s Russia investigation before Mueller was appointed to take over the probe.

Manafort, in an unusual legal move, on Wednesday sued Mueller.

The civil lawsuit accuses Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, of exceeding his legal authority to “grant Mr. Mueller carte blanche to investigate and pursue criminal charges in connection with anything he stumbles across.”

“The lawsuit is frivolous, but the defendant is entitled to file whatever he wants,” a Justice Department spokesperson, who asked not to be named, tells VOA News.

VOA’s Department of Justice correspondent Masood Farivar and Ken Bredemeier contributed to this report.

In a regional review for BIRN, the European Commission says it is working on a new strategy for the Balkans and urges the countries to embrace the chance to further their European perspectives.

The spokesperson of the European Commission, Maja Kocijancic, says 2018 could be the year of opportunity for Western Balkan countries to take irreversible steps on their EU integration path.

However, Kocijancic told BIRN that, to achieve this goal, the countries concerned must make reforms, in particular on the rule of law, justice and fundamental rights, a priority.

“The EU will not compromise on the accession criteria. Any serious progress is conditional upon effective reforms,” she explained.

Although most countries have made progress towards EU membership, Kocijancic added that many reforms remain outstanding, especially in the area of the rule of law, justice and fundamental rights.

The countries of the region are at different stages.

Montenegro and Serbia have started EU membership talks, while Macedonia and Albania have obtained candidate country status.

Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are further behind but seen as potential candidates for EU membership at some point.

The EU retains a direct supporting role in Bosnia, through the EUFOR/Althea military-led mission. Between 2003 and 2012, the EU deployed a police mission in Bosnia, too.

In Kosovo, the EU still deploys EULEX, a mission designed to support the Kosovo courts in upholding the rule of law.

Kocijanic said the EU was now working on a new framework for the whole region.

“To sustain the positive momentum overall, as well as to better address common challenges, the Commission finds it necessary to provide a separate, dedicated framework for supporting all the countries of the Western Balkans on their path to EU membership,” she said.

In this context, she said the Commission is working on a strategy that will be adopted in February 2018.

In addition, in April 2018, it will present its regular Enlargement report, which will include detailed reports on the enlargement countries.

“These will take stock of progress in the countries towards meeting the obligations of membership and will assess the level of their preparedness to join the EU,” Kocijancic noted.

The Balkan region is also high on the EU agenda because three Balkan EU member states, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, will hold the European Council presidency in 2018 and 2019 during the important Brexit negotiations.

While Kocijancic did not reveal what EU Commission documents will say exactly about each country in 2018, BIRN has received country inputs and reviews from the EU official.

Albania:

The EU believes Albania has shown steady progress on all five key priorities required to move forward in the EU integration process – public administration reform, judicial reform, fighting organised crime, fighting corruption, and human rights.

“It is now implementing justice reform and in particular the vetting of judges and prosecutors. This process is monitored by an International Monitoring Operation led by the European Commission,” Kocijancic said.

The input underlined that, as the EU President Jean-Claude Juncker pointed out recently: “If the reform path is continued, the Commission intends to recommend the opening of accession negotiations for the country within the next six months”.

Bosnia and Herzegovina:

On Bosnia, the Commission is currently preparing an Opinion on its application for EU membership.

“We look forward to receiving the answers to the comprehensive questionnaire Commissioner Johannes Hahn handed over to country authorities in December 2016. And we also expect Bosnia and Herzegovina authorities to deliver on their signed commitment to undertake all needed reforms to advance the country towards the EU,” the EU official noted.

“It is time for the country leaders and politicians to overcome ethnic divisions and to work together for the benefit of all citizens.”

Kosovo:

Kocijancic said the EU expects Kosovo “to fully engage on its EU agenda: to push forward long overdue reforms, especially on the rule of law and economic development, as set out in the European Reform Agenda” .

Progress on the EU-led dialogue with Serbia, working towards a comprehensive normalisation of relations, she added, will be crucial for Kosovo to move forward on its European path.

“We encourage the government to meet the remaining requirements on visa liberalisation, to deliver on the legitimate expectations of citizens,” she said.

Montenegro:

The EU expects Montenegro to remain committed to its strategic goal of EU integration, and to accelerate and implement necessary reforms, in particular in the rule of law, which will continue to determine the overall pace of negotiations.

“As the most advanced country in accession negotiations, it will be important for Montenegro to bring down tensions and re-engage political debate in the parliament, where it belongs,” the EU said.

Serbia:

Progress on the Dialogue with Kosovo, working towards a comprehensive normalisation of relations, are deemed crucial for Serbia to move ahead in its EU accession process.
Serbia is described as making good progress, with 12 negotiation chapters opened, and two of them provisionally closed.

“The EU is committed to maintain this momentum and open several new chapters in 2018. It is up to Serbia to set the pace of negotiations, particularly by making real, substantive progress on the rule of law”.

Macedonia:

Regarding Macedonia, the EU said it expects the government and opposition “to continue to implement their political [Przino] agreement and the Urgent Reform Priorities, getting their country back on its EU path, so that the Commission can recommend the opening of accession negotiations”.

The EU official added that Brussels expects the government to continue to strengthen relations with its neighbours.

(EurActiv) — A sweeping overhaul of EU financial market rules went into effect on Wednesday (3 January), but only 11 member states met the deadline to start applying the new rules.

Mifid II, an acronym short for markets in financial instruments directive II, is ten years in the making and runs thousands of pages long. The massive rulebook beefs up consumer protection and attempts to avoid some of the problems that led to the 2007 financial crisis by requiring much more surveillance of trading.

But most EU countries are not prepared to start enforcing the rules, and face expensive changes to start implementing the electronic reporting measures for banks and traders. Companies have also complained about the costs.

The Association of German Banks estimated that Germany’s banking industry alone has already spent €1 billion to prepare for Mifid II. Germany, France and the UK are among the countries that began implementing the law on 3 January.

But both countries handed out last-minute extensions this week to large exchanges that will only have to comply starting in 2020.

Under the Mifid II rules, fund managers are now required to report details of trades within 15 minutes, or face fines. The new law will also overhaul how banks and companies record communications about trading.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), which is in charge of overseeing Mifid II, has tried to calm concerns over the shaky start to the new law. The Paris-based authority warned that companies can still comply with the rules even if the member states where they are located have not yet translated the EU directive into national law.

Because of its complexity, Mifid II came into effect one year after it was initially planned.

ESMA Chairman Steven Maijoor cautioned in October that “one should not underestimate the size and complexity of this project, and thus the risk of potential glitches in the initial operational period.”

Many bankers worked through Tuesday night to prepare for the rules to go into effect the next day.

David Lawton, managing director at consultancy Alvarez & Marsal, told Reuters on Tuesday, “For the markets facing processes, there will be a very intensive through-the-night activity.”

Crimea is becoming a growing financial burden for the Russian government. Under a three-year budget plan set to start in 2018, Moscow is covering over three-quarters of the peninsula’s operating costs.

The de-facto State Council of the Republic of Crimea recently passed the territory’s budget for 2018-2020. That plan, along with relevant legislation, states the peninsula should be financially independent. Yet, the budget numbers indicate that the region’s dependence on the Kremlin is set to keep growing.

Under the 2018 budget, 77 percent of Crimea’s expenditures are projected to be covered by funds from Russia’s federal budget; the Kremlin will also pay for 60 percent of Sevastopol’s 2018 budget. The city, home to the Black Sea Fleet, is administered directly by the federal government.

In 2019-20, Moscow is expected to provide almost 79 percent of the Crimean government’s operating expenses. For Sevastopol, the share is expected to grow to 65 percent.

Russian and Ukrainian analysts both say that the annexed territory’s financial woes, and its increasing budgetary reliance on Moscow, are not surprising. But they tend to differ about the peninsula’s financial future.

For Dmitry Solonnikov, head of Russia’s Institute for Modern National Development, there is little cause for concern. “Everyone understands that for Crimea’s social infrastructure to start working… for investments to start flowing in… money from [Russia’s] federal budget must first be invested,” he said. “It is a logical situation at the current stage of Crimea’s development.”

Taras Zagorodny, a managing partner of Ukraine-based National Anti-Crisis Group, asserted that the territory was on its way to becoming a financial sink hole. “Crimea’s economy has practically collapsed. Ports do not work; agriculture is dying; there are no tourists for many different reasons,” he said. “Up to 90 percent of tourists used to come from Ukraine.”

Not too long after Crimea’s annexation by Russia in 2014, the peninsula’s new de-facto government pledged to become financially self-sustainable. “We intend to become a donor region. We are sure that in the next five to six years, we will break the trend, and end the dependence on [Russia’s] federal budget,” Crimea’s de-facto president Sergei Aksenov said that year. Local authorities said at the time that potential drivers of growth would be its tourism and defense industries, as well as oil and gas extraction in the Black and Azov seas.

Aksenov’s prediction has proven illusory. Moscow’s subsidization of the Crimean government has followed a steady upward trajectory, skyrocketing from 64.3 billion rubles in 2015 to 107 billion in 2017, an amount that was roughly two-thirds of the territory’s budget this year. During this timeframe, the ruble exchange rate remained relatively stable.

The situation in Sevastopol, in terms of financial dependence on the Kremlin, is not much better. In 2018, Moscow will fork out 21.5 billion rubles to cover 60 percent of the city’s 35.7 billion ruble budget. And despite Kremlin assistance, the Sevastopol budget is projected to run a 3.8 billion-ruble deficit next year.

Crimea’s revenue, while rising, cannot keep pace with ever-growing expenses. In 2018, the peninsular government is expected to take in 38.4 billion rubles, compared with 25.6 billion rubles in 2015.

According to Crimea’s 2018-2020 budget, key expense items include infrastructure development, education, welfare, utilities, healthcare and culture. Notably, only 0.4 percent of the peninsula’s budget (or 1.2 billion rubles) is earmarked for “defense, security and law enforcement.” This suggests that the bulk of security-related costs will be covered by Russia’s federal budget.

Scientists have found surprising evidence of rapid climate change in the Arctic: In the middle of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, they discovered that the levels of radium-228 have almost doubled over the last decade.

The finding indicates that large-scale changes are happening along the coast–because the source of the radium is the land and shallow continental shelves surrounding the ocean. These coastal changes, in turn, could also be delivering more nutrients, carbon, and other chemicals into the Arctic Ocean and lead to dramatic impacts on Arctic food webs and animal populations.

The research team, led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), suspects that melting sea ice has left more open water near the coast for winds to create waves. The wave action reaches down to the shallow shelves and stirs up sediments, releasing radium that is carried to the surface and away into the open ocean. The same mechanism would likely also mobilize and deliver more nutrients, carbon, and other chemicals into the Arctic Ocean, fueling the growth of plankton at the bottom of the food chain. That, in turn, could have significant impacts on fish and marine mammals and change the Arctic ecosystem.

The study was published Jan. 3, 2018, in the journal Science Advances. The research team included Lauren Kipp, Matthew Charette, and Paul Henderson (WHOI), Willard Moore (University of South Carolina), and Ignatius Rigor (University of Washington).

Scientists have long used radium-228 to track the flow of material from land and sediments into the ocean. It is a naturally occurring isotope produced by the radioactive decay of thorium in sediments. But unlike thorium, it dissolves into water, where scientists can track the sources, amounts, rates, and direction of its flow, said Kipp, who is lead author of the study and a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography.

Kipp led efforts to measure radium at 69 locations from the western edge of the Arctic Ocean to the Pole on a two-month voyage aboard the icebreaker Healy in the summer of 2015. The cruise was part of the international GEOTRACES program, which aims to measure chemical tracers in the world’s ocean to understand ocean circulation and provide a baseline to assess future chemical changes in the oceans. The U.S. GEOTRACES program and this study are both funded by the National Science Foundation.

To their surprise, the research team found that radium-228 concentrations in the central Arctic Ocean had increased substantially since measurements had last been made in 2007. What was its source and why had it increased?

The team investigated the trajectories of sea ice drifting in the ocean and saw a pattern of ice–and hence water–flowing northward from the vast northern coast of Russia toward the middle of the Arctic Ocean, where the radium concentrations had increased. The pattern aligned with the Transpolar Drift, a powerful current flowing in same direction that could transport radium from coastal sources.

They concluded that the excess radium had to have come from sediments in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off Russia, the largest continental shelf on Earth. It is relatively shallow, with an average depth of 170 feet, but it extends 930 miles off shore and contains a vast reservoir of radium and other chemical compounds.

Something had to have changed along the coast to explain the dramatic surge in radium in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. The scientists theorize that a warming Arctic environment has reduced sea ice cover, allowing for more wave action that stirs up sediments and mobilizes more radium.

But there are other possible contributing factors that are causing changes over the shelf, the scientists say. More wave action can also cause more coastline erosion, adding more terrestrial sediment into the ocean. Warming temperatures can thaw permafrost, liberating more material into the ocean, and increasing river and groundwater runoff can carry more radium, nutrients, carbon, and other material into the Arctic.

“Continued monitoring of shelf inputs to Arctic surface waters is therefore vital to understand how the changing climate will affect the chemistry, biology, and economic resources of the Arctic Ocean,” the study’s authors wrote.

Data coverage over the East Siberian Shelf is currently very limited, so it is important to conduct more studies in this region in order to pinpoint the direct causes of the increased shelf inputs and allow future monitoring. “Evidence from Kipp and co-workers for substantial ongoing change in the chemical environment of the Arctic Ocean emphasizes the need for sustained study of these changes and of the processes involved,” said Bob Anderson, an Ewing-Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the director of the U.S. GEOTRACES Program Office. “It would be great if related efforts by marine geochemists in Russia could be integrated with future studies by other nations, for example under the auspices of the international GEOTRACES program.”

Scientists now have a new tool to predict the future effects of climate change on crop yields.

Researchers from University of Illinois are attempting to bridge two types of computational crop models to become more reliable predictors of crop production in the U.S. Corn Belt.

“One class of crop models is agronomy-based and the other is embedded in climate models or earth system models. They are developed for different purposes and applied at different scales,” said Kaiyu Guan, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois and the principal investigator on the research. “Because each has its own strengths and weaknesses, our simple idea is to combine the strengths of both types of models to make a new crop model with improved prediction performance.”

Guan and his research team implemented and evaluated a new maize growth model, represented as the CLM-APSIM model, by combining superior features in both Community Land Model (CLM) and Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM).

“The original maize model in CLM only has three phenological stages, or life cycles. Some important developmental stages such as flowering are missing, making it impossible to apply some critical stresses, such as water stress or high temperature at these specific developmental stages,” said Bin Peng, a postdoctoral researcher in Guan’s lab and also the lead author. “Our solution is incorporating the life cycle development scheme of APSIM, which has 12 stages, into the CLM model. Through this integration, stresses induced by high temperature, soil water and nitrogen deficits, can be taken into account in the new model.”

Peng says they chose CLM as the hosting framework to implement the new model because it is more process-based and can be coupled with climate models.

“This is important as the new tool can be used to investigate the two-way feedback between an agroecosystem and a climate system in our future studies.”

In addition to replacing the original maize phenology model in CLM with that from the APSIM model, the researchers have made several other innovative improvements in the new model. A new carbon allocation scheme and a grain number simulation scheme were added, as well as a refinement to the original canopy structure scheme.

“The most alluring improvement is that our new model is closer to getting the right yield with the right mechanism,” said Guan. “The original CLM model underestimates above-ground biomass but overestimates the harvest index of maize, leading to apparent right-yield simulation with the wrong mechanism. Our new model corrected this deficiency in the original CLM model.”

Peng added that the phenology scheme of APSIM is quite generic. “We can easily extend our new model to simulate the growth processes of other staple crops, such as soybeans and wheat. This is definitely in our plan and we are already working on it.

“All the work was conducted on Blue Waters, a powerful petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the University of Illinois campus,” said Peng. “We are currently working on parameter sensitivity analysis and Bayesian calibration of this new model and also on a high resolution regional simulation over the U.S. Corn Belt, all of which would not be possible without the precious computational resources provided by Blue Waters.”

Scientists from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and University of Valladolid have developed a neural network prediction model of corruption based on economic and political factors. The results of the research were published in Social Indicators Research.

Researchers contend that corruption must be detected as soon as possible in order to take corrective and preventive measures. Because public resources for combating corruption are limited, efforts should focus on areas most likely to be involved in corruption cases. They use a unique database that brings together the main cases of political corruption in Spain. Then they propose an early warning corruption model to predict whether corruption cases are likely to emerge in Spanish regions given certain macroeconomic and political determinants.

The model provides different profiles of corruption risk depending on the economic conditions of a region conditional on the timing of the prediction.

Scientists of HSE and University of Valladolid have used self-organizing maps (SOMs), a neural network approach, to predict corruption cases in different time horizons. SOMs are a kind of artificial neural network that aim to mimic brain functions. SOMs have the ability to extract patterns from large data sets without an explicit understanding of the underlying relationships. They convert nonlinear relations among high dimensional data into simple geometric connections. These properties have made SOMs a useful tool to detect patterns and obtain visual representations of large amounts of data. Consequently, predicting corruption is a field in which SOMs can become a powerful tool.

The results show that economic factors prove to be relevant predictors of corruption. Researchers find that the taxation of real estate, economic growth, increased house prices, and the growing number of deposit institutions and non-financial firms may induce public corruption. They also find that the same ruling party remaining in power too long is positively related to public corruption.

Depending on the characteristics of each region, the probability of corrupt cases emerging over a period of up three years can be estimated. Then the different patterns of corruption antecedents were detected. Whereas in some cases, corruption cases can be predicted well before they occur and thus allow preventive measures to be implemented, in other cases the prediction period is much shorter and urgent corrective political measures are required. The method consists of a sophisticated algorithm with multiple non-linear relations according to which the determinants of the propensity to corruption change throughout the time.

“Our research develops a novel approach with three differential characteristics. First, unlike previous research, which is mainly based on the perception of corruption, we use data on actual cases of corruption,” said one of the authors of the research Félix J. López-Iturriaga, Leading Research Fellow at the International Laboratory of Intangible-driven Economy of HSE. “Second, we use the neural network approach, a particularly suitable method since it does not make assumptions about data distribution. Neural networks are quite powerful and flexible modeling devices that do not make restrictive assumptions on the data-generating process or the statistical laws concerning the relevant variables. Third, we report the probability of corruption cases on different time scenarios, so that anti-corruption measures can be tailored depending on the immediacy of such corrupt practices. Our model allows patterns of corruption to be identified on different time horizons.”

Since corruption remains a widespread global concern, a key issue in the research is the generalizability of the model and the proposed actions. Scientists have used fairly common macroeconomic and political variables that are widely available from public sources in many countries. In turn, the model can be applied to other regions and countries as well. Of course, it could be improved if country or region-specific factors were taken into account.

The approach in the research is interesting both for academia and public authorities. For academia, scientists provide an innovative way to predict public corruption using neural networks. These methods have often been used to predict corporate financial distress and other economic events, but no studies have yet attempted to use neural networks to predict public corruption. Consequently, the researchers extend the domain of neural network application.

For public authorities, they provide a model that improves the efficiency of the measures aimed at fighting corruption. Because the resources available to combat corruption are limited, authorities can use the early corruption warning system, which categorizes each province according to its corruption profile, in order to narrow their focus and better implement preventive and corrective policies. In addition, this model predicts corruption cases long before they are discovered, which enhances anticipatory measures. The model can be especially relevant in countries suffering the severest corruption problems. In fact, European Union authorities are highly concerned about widespread corruption in certain countries and can use this approach to prevent corruption.

By Vijay Shankar*

Two seemingly disparate incidents in recent days hold the portents for unsettling times. The first was the ‘absconder General’ and erstwhile Pakistan President Musharraf’s declaration on 5 December 2017, of not only his cosy ties with Hafiz Sayeed, the proscribed head of the terror organisation Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT); but more worrisome, the open invitation to the latter’s political party, the Milli Muslim League, to join Musharraf’s Pakistan Awami Ittehad (PAI). The second was President Trump’s assertion, while launching his administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), “Pakistan must demonstrate it is a responsible steward of its nuclear assets…while taking decisive action against terrorist groups operating on their territory.” The NSS, it will be remembered, provides strategic guidance to US security agencies for developing policies and implementing them.

Rationally, no nuclear policy, by nature of the weapon involved, can conceivably be inclusive of terror groups. And yet the strategic predicament posed by Pakistan is perverse, for their policy on select terror groups such as the LeT has always been that they are instruments of state policy. The absurd reason proffered is their zeal to fight the external enemies of Pakistan while undermining fissiparous religious elements within.

The question now remains: when militants fundamentally inimical to the Indian state (Israel and the US, too) shed the need for subterfuge and quite openly enter Pakistan national politics, is “responsible nuclear stewardship” a prospect at all? Rather, does not this new dimension of political cosiness make for a nuclear nightmare, where an opaque nuclear arsenal under military control is guided by a strategy that not only finds unity with state-licensed terror groups but has now unveiled a future for terrorists in politics? Indeed, the nuclear nightmare has moved that much closer.

Now, consider this: Pakistan promotes a terrorist strike in India and in order to counter conventional retaliation, uses tactical nuclear weapons, and then in order to degrade nuclear retaliation, launches a full blown counter-force or counter-value strike. This is an awkward but realistic recognition of the logic that drives Pakistan’s nuclear policy.

Cyril Almeida, a columnist with Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, commenting on the reason why the army will not clamp down on terror groups that hurt India, suggested that the problem was “the boys” (meaning the army) “wouldn’t agree. You could see why: you can’t squeeze your asset at the behest of the enemy the asset was recruited to fight against.”

What if the political mainstreaming of jihadists enlarges and gains nation-wide acceptance and, while doing so, creates a state and movement largely motivated by fundamental politico-religious ideology? The Taliban and its five-year rule in Afghanistan attempted precisely this and failed because a creed that sought a particular kind of Islamic revival through suppression of all else was but a return to medievalism. A regime of this nature quite wontedly spewed elements that saw salvation only in the destruction of contemporary order. The image of Mullah Omar appearing on the roof of a building in Kandhar, 1996, shrouded in the relic of “the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed,” while other mullahs proclaimed him Amir-ul Momineen – the Commander of the Faithful – will remain a watershed moment for the ideology. It placed in perspective the unquestionable authority of the Amir as the people’s voice was made increasingly irreconcilable with Sharia, as was regard for human rights and the rule of law. In this ‘divinely ordained’ disposition, the savage destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a symbol of an end to idolatry came as no surprise. As events unfolded it also brought to the fore how modernity and the political mainstreaming of jihadists is a doomed enterprise.

And, what of “responsible stewardship” of nuclear assets? The hazards of a political future for terrorists in Pakistan have thus far been argued. In this reality, given access to a nuclear arsenal, is its utilisation to prosecute jihadi objectives not perceived? The Pakistan military hardly minces its words on the use of jihadists and the latter’s correlation with their nuclear policy (Pakistan Army Green Book 2004-2015). What is the Pakistan-sponsored terror objective other than to weaken the secular fabric of the Indian state, subvert society, and bring about enabling conditions for secession of Kashmir? It is not a coincidence that these very same objectives find recurring mention in the strategic aims of the military in Pakistan.

In the nine years after 26/11, terror attacks in India originating from across its western borders persist, however with a difference: that principal control from Pakistan has devolved to decentralised and often scattered control. Targets are relatively less sensational, albeit these attacks are executed with no less brutality or with diminished politically motivation. Musharraf’s invitation to militant groups such as the LeT to join the political mainstream in Pakistan will have changed all that for the worse.

Pakistan, decidedly, has legitimate security interests, but when these interests are revisionist in nature – be it an aggressive quest for strategic depth in Afghanistan or attempting to destabilise India through the use of state-sponsored terrorists or even to suggest that there is a nuclear dimension to these dynamics – is to plead a stimulus much deeper than a politico-ideological pledge. For to challenge India, or in Afghanistan, the US, is to withdraw from what makes for contemporary order. What is emerging and must be recognised is that with Pakistan there is a virulence that ought not to be allowed to thrive under the duplicitous belief that it can be both legatee of international largesse and continue to cavort with jihadists.

* Vijay Shankar
Former Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Forces Command of India

It would be unwise to expect that Trump’s tweet represents a major policy shift. That Pakistan has been playing the US on the issue of support to the Taliban is no secret. If anything, Trump’s remarks are a manifestation of American frustration in getting Pakistan to behave.

By Manoj Joshi

The attack on Sunday, 31 December 2017, that killed five CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district marks the failure of the Narendra Modi government’s hardline policy of finishing off armed militancy in the state. This has involved a tough approach towards Pakistan, as well as a major offensive to kill or capture militants within the Valley.

Last month, the Lok Sabha was told that there had been a 230 per cent increase in the number of ceasefire violations along the Line of Control (LoC). This is despite a three-year policy of reining in Pakistan through heavy retaliatory firing along the LoC and the so-called surgical strikes of September 2016.

Indian policy now seems to be resting on the hope that the United States’ tough stand on Pakistan, most recently revealed by President Trump’s New Year tweet, will bring Islamabad to heel.

A dangerous trend: Kashmiris getting involved in Fidayeen attacks

The more alarming news, perhaps, is the suicide attack on the CRPF camp. It signals a new and dangerous trend — triggered in part by the government’s policy missteps — of Kashmiris getting involved in Fidayeen attacks. Till now, this was the preserve of hardened Pakistani nationals, but in this particular attack, it was reported that two, or perhaps all three, of the militants who were killed were locals.

Ever since the killing of Burhan Wani in 2016, the security forces have been on the offensive against militancy in the Valley. This has led to the killing of 214 militants in 2017, nearly double the number of those killed in 2013 or 2014. But it has also led to a sharp rise in the fatalities of the security forces, reaching 88 in 2016 and 83 in 2017, as compared to a low of 17 in 2012. The fact that the militants killed in Pulwama were from Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) indicates that the so-called surgical strikes have failed to deter Pakistani adventurism.

The militants may have been Kashmiri, but there should be no doubt that the task of motivating them would have been carried out by a seasoned handler, almost certainly a Pakistani.

Impact of surgical strikes overstated

Actually, the impact of the so-called surgical strikes has been overstated from the outset. Indeed, this was evident when a far more serious attack occurred within two months of the strikes on the army’s 166 Field Regiment near Nagrota in November 2016, leading to the death of seven Indian soldiers, including two officers.

Unlike the attack on Uri, which triggered the ‘surgical strikes’ and which lies very close to the LoC, Nagrota is a Corps headquarters and lies at least 60 km from the border.

The logic of the ‘surgical strikes’ would have suggested that every significant Pakistani provocation would be met by a disproportionately tough response. Yet, there was no Indian reaction.

Indian policy not working

In fact, there have been as many as four Fidayeen attacks in 2017 itself.

On 27 April, three jawans were killed in an attack on the Panzgam garrison along the LoC in Kupwara district. On 5 June, an attack on a CRPF camp in Bandipora was foiled and all four Pakistani Fidayeen were killed. On 27 August, eight police personnel were killed in an encounter following a Fidyaeen attack in Pulwama. And on 3 October, a BSF junior officer was killed and three others were injured following an attack on the BSF’s camp at Srinagar airport. All of these attacks have been authored by the JeM, the outfit run by Masood Azhar, which was responsible for the Uri and Pathankot attacks. The Indian policy has not been working since the Pathankot attack of January 2016. The effort to make a political outreach through interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma is too recent and inchoate to yield results.

Unwise to expect that Trump’s tweet represents a major policy shift

So, it would seem that New Delhi is depending on the United States to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. Perhaps that is what accounts for the joyous response to Trump’s tweet by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s official spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, who said that it was the result of Modi’s diplomacy. It would be unwise to expect that Trump’s tweet represents a major policy shift. That Pakistan has been playing the US on the issue of support to the Taliban is no secret. If anything, Trump’s remarks are a manifestation of American frustration in getting Pakistan to behave.

Trump has publicly attacked Pakistan on the issue of its support to the Taliban.

In August 2017, he announced his policy of ramping up troop levels in Afghanistan beyond the 8,400 number left by the Obama administration. Besides giving them autonomy to fight as they pleased, he called on Pakistan to “immediately” stop supporting “the very terrorists we are fighting.”

Things came to a head after the US discovered that a militant had been captured in the rescue of a Canadian couple in October 2017. But when the US demanded that Pakistan give them access to interrogate him, Islamabad flatly refused. No doubt Pakistan was worried as to what could be revealed by the militant in such an interrogation.

This is what possibly led to Trump’s tweet and the US withholding USSD 255 million in aid to Pakistan.

This article originally appeared in The Quint.

By Jim Garamone

There is a blurring line that separates conventional operating forces from special operations forces and the defense secretary expects general purpose forces will eventually shoulder missions once the province of their special forces brethren.

US Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told Pentagon reporters that the experiences of war since 9/11 have blurred the lines.

This change will not be enshrined in strategy, he said, but will come about as a result of policy and the growth of general purpose forces’ capabilities.

Growth of General Purpose Force Capabilities

Mattis said he expects more general purpose forces to take on missions in Iraq and Syria. “In the Trans-Sahel [region of Africa], many of the force supporting the French effort are general purpose forces,” the secretary said.

If a mission comes up, the secretary said he’ll determine the parameters of it and pass that to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The chairman will then determine what forces take on that mission. They may be special operations forces or general purpose forces with unique capabilities.

U.S. Military Evolves Through War Experiences

This is an evolution of the U.S. military spurred by the lessons of war, the secretary said.

Mattis said he does not want a force that is dominant in yesterday’s challenges, but irrelevant in today’s. The general purpose force, he added, is going to have to have the capabilities that were once associated only with special operations forces.

The secretary gave the example of remotely piloted vehicles. In 2001, he said, the only people who ran drones were special operations forces.

In 2007, an Army captain on one street was looking at a feed from a drone overhead with strike capabilities from the Navy and Army standing by, the secretary said. In the meantime, a “CIA guy was in his headquarters talking with one of his agents in an Army brigade,” Mattis said. “That is not what an Army brigade did in Desert Storm or the Fulda Gap [in what was then West Germany]. The change happened because war initiated those changes. Those are now common capabilities.”

By Mitchell Blatt*

Before New Year’s and continuing until the present, Iranians have taken to the streets to demand political and economic reforms. Over 400 protesters have been reportedly arrested and 20 killed. Having cracked down violently on protests in 2009, too, the Iranian government appears to face a crisis of legitimacy.

Much of the commentary from the political right, however, launders the protesters’ real grievances to make partisan political points. Take Fox News opinion columnist Stephen L. Miller (@RedSteeze on Twitter). Yesterday evening (US time), he had published a garden variety “Why aren’t liberal feminists supporting Muslim women in the Middle East?” article.

In this case, the specific language was: “Women are leading in Iran. Where is their voice of support from the left?”

So the question must be asked: Where are the women’s movement supporters in the United States and Europe, which gathered en masse to protest a newly inaugurated American president last year?

The question presumes that a protest in America against Iran’s government would have much influence in toppling Iran’s government. It presumes Americans shouldn’t care about the actions of their own government–or at least shouldn’t care any more about their own government’s actions than they do about those of foreign governments. After all, why should Americans protest bad governance and abuses of power in America if they don’t protest about foreign countries?

The question could be asked about anything. Why hasn’t Stephen L. Miller written anything about North Korea’s human rights abuses lately? Why hasn’t he written about democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary governments?

Hell, Miller was outraged about the IRS reportedly scrutinizing tax exemption applications from Tea Party groups. Even if a conspiracy against the Tea Party existed (and it didn’t–liberal groups applying for tax exempt status were scrutinized, too, according to an audit conducted years later), would it really be as bad as South African leader Jacob Zuma’s hundreds of crimes of corruption?

One can imagine the story framed in Miller’s terms:

So the question must be asked: Where are the conservatives and Tea Partiers in the United States, which gathered en masse to protest a newly inaugurated American president on Tax Day?

Another cliché gaining being pushed on Iran is the typical: “Why isn’t the media covering this story that I read about in the media?” Stephen Miller wrote on December 30:

The question that needs to be asked right now is why traditional mainstream media outlets – grandstanding over their importance in this new, bold era of fact-checking and truth-telling – have largely ignored a blossoming revolution.

Funnily enough, Tablet Magazine published Lee Smith’s article that very same day: “Why Can’t the American Media Cover the Protests in Iran?”

Clearly stories about the United States are more relevant to Americans than stories about foreign countries, and stories about Europe, China, Russia, or other world powers are also reported on more because those countries exert more influence on the US and the world. The concern over Iran being purportedly ignored is the conservative inverse of what is heard from the left when a terrorist attack in Europe gets more attention from the “corporate media” (Project Censored) than “at least 12 other terrorist attacks that week” (Huffington Post).

Yet the fact that we are talking and writing about the Iran protests, with coverage and commentary in outlets across the internet, from Slate to Politico to Fox News to Tablet to National Review to Commentary to the AP to the New York Times would seem to contradict the premise.

Stephen L. Miller, who may never have even visited Iran, wouldn’t even know credible facts about the protests without the media’s reporting on it (neither have I, and I wouldn’t presume to know exactly what’s happening on the ground in Iran and what its society thinks). Sure, one can hear of a protest on Twitter, but the news, videos, and factual claims made by people who are often activists are not easily verifiable. Reports by the professional journalists in a chaotic time in a democracy, let alone a closed country, are far from perfect, too, but they are our best source of information.

Despite a near blackout, these protests are not intended for domestic Iranian audiences only.

Lee Smith is a heavily partisan neo-conservative who strongly opposed Obama’s Iran deal.

His grievance with the media is that not everyone who reports on the protests holds the exact same view as him.

What Iranians are really upset about, the messaging goes, isn’t the daily grind of living in a repressive theocratic police state run by a criminal elite that robs them blind, but a normal human desire for better living standards.

Imagine humans desiring better living standards. Who would want such a thing? In point of fact, economic-related grievances are cause for many protests–and there isn’t anything at all wrong with taking to the streets to protest for just that reason. Most people want to live better, and when people demand the airy ideal of “democracy,” what they usually mean is having more control in their own lives and ability to strive.

Lee should read some Ronald Inglehart (Modernization and Postmodernization) and or Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s 2012 work Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty to learn about how interrelated democratic institutions and economic development can be. If the middle class is growing, they will be more likely to want democracy, and an open and pluralistic society that offers incentives for beneficial economic behavior is important for growth. In short, democratic-style reforms (broadly speaking) will be likely necessary in Iran in order for it to pursue economic development, and that development, too, will likely spur further demands.

All the same, the protesters risking their lives and liberty against the regime’s armed enforcers may not very well not represent the majority of Iranians. Not everyone in the world supports Western-style democracy, and it would be a mistake to suppose they do without preparing for the disappointment that often follows regime-change.

Typically, the hyperbolic faction within neo-conservatives, represented by Lee, misjudges and exaggerates about those they disagree with. Obama is not merely liberal. In Lee’s mind, he’s “anti-Semitic.” The Obama administration wasn’t trying to limit Iran’s nuclear development, not even to balance against the Saudis, but rather to “ditch Israel” and “embrace Iran.”

Hence the real reason there is so much flak coming out from conservatives on Iran. The theocratic Iranian regime is just collateral damage in their war with the Democrats.

By Richard Kraemer*

(FPRI) — The current protests throughout Iran are unprecedented in its post-revolutionary history. They are driven primarily by a popular sense of economic indignity borne of decades of mismanagement, rampant cronyism, low oil prices, and tough sanctions; in other words, the catalysts are not ideological.

The protests are spread across the country, remarkably making their way to the capital, rather emanating from it. They are at present leaderless, unlike 1979 or 2009. And distinct from the latter year’s Green Movement, when perhaps less than one million Iranians possessed smartphones, over 47 million now have them at their disposal. When the revolution eventually comes, it will be streamed.

A number of Arab autocrats were brought down in comparable circumstances. Endemic corruption. Social injustice. Egalitarian grassroots movements connected through social networks and other exciting tools of information communication technology. Yet, as time has shown, the courageous struggles of millions of Arab peoples were met with mixed success, if not abject failure in Egypt and Syria. Reflections on those events known as the Arab Spring would be worrying if used as a prism foretelling the Iranian regime’s imminent collapse.

And collapse it will—but not just yet. Rather than pointlessly reviving the genuine, but unwarranted, headiness of the Summer of ’09, for now, a more sobering view best be taken with considerations of what is different this time.

“It’s the economy…”

The unmet economic expectations of many Iranians have boiled over at last. President Hassan Rouhani had widely foregone the gratuitous and unsustainable subsidy programs of his predecessor. (Former President Mahmood Ahmadinejad was uniquely astounding in his unswerving ignorance of basic economics.) Yet, Rouhani was able to do so with the implicit belief of the Iranian people that, nuclear deal with the West secured, the economy would open up with attendant wealth generation. To the questionable extent that it did, there was no trickle down. Thus, it is worth noting Iran analyst Mohammed Ali Shabani’s prescient application of the J-curve theorem, whereby economic hardship crystallized in unmet expectations tips into civil strife.

To argue with certainty that something other than pitifully poor economic performance is the primary driver behind the past week’s demonstrations would be disingenuous. Recognizing that the 20^th century’s major revolutions were largely rooted in cries for greater economic equality, they were coupled with political demands based in an ideology that would theoretically deliver social justice as understood by the discontented.

Accordingly, the economic malcontent that led to the 1979 Revolution was shared among its competing factions of liberal democrats, leftists, and Islamists, yet each with their own specific concept of governmental (e.g. political) remedy. And while poor standards of living were a factor in the Green Movement’s broad appeal, 2009’s protestors initially took to the streets calling “Where’s my vote?”—a political appeal, first and foremost.

The absence of genuine political demands at present suggest that regime change is secondary, so don’t be misled by chants of “Death to the Dictator.” As one analyst aptly noted,

Iranians have been conditioned for nearly 40 years to reflexively shout “death to” something when they are enraged. It can mean anything from “please overhaul this whole system” to “please get rid of this particular leader who embodies all my grief at my troubled life.”

Or, it could simply mean, “Bring the prices of eggs and such under control, some real job opportunities, and a little less isolation and we’re cool.”

It is no coincidence that these rather politically rudderless demonstrations lack central leadership. Among other things, people look to leaders for solutions, i.e. alternative approaches to fix what isn’t working. Absent such an individual(s), the ball sits in the regime’s court as they scramble to craft a mollifying response, one that may be acceptable to the majority of demonstrators while preserving the state’s post-revolutionary foundations.

No Rest for the Wicked

Can the regime apply a Band-Aid big enough to finagle an extended lease-on-life? Perhaps so, but one increasingly short term as indicated by the other two unprecedented—and interconnected—aspects of the past week’s uprisings.

First is the geographic expanse of the protests, underlining their economic impetus. This is a level of discontent that can’t be explained away as whining by “disloyal” urban elites. Iranians of all classes are increasingly fed up not only with a weak economy, but also with a rapidly diminishing water supply, endemic air pollution, and the state’s deplorable response to last November’s earthquake, not to mention a bulging youth demographic desiring greater individual freedoms.

So while some Basij—a paramilitary militia under Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps direction—goon may club a hipster for being part of an imaginary Fifth Column, it is conceivably harder for him to beat a poor farmer demanding water for his crops. Nor might a small town policeman be inclined to shoot at a neighbor (cousin?) on the pretext that he or she, demonstrating for the sake of job opportunity, is actually an agitator in some fabricated imperialist plot. There still exists among many Iranians a sense of human decency that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran can’t and will never control. This scares them to death and rightfully so.

Second, the regimes’ desired command control of communications is becoming increasingly illusive. The once-touted “Halal Net” has yet to effectively block Iranians from multiple avenues to unadulterated information. Unable to rollback the remarkable expansion of smartphone usage and the mass dissemination of information that they enable, the Iranian government is decreasingly capable of isolating its citizens from one another, much less them from the world beyond its borders. To place the potential impact of these means of communication in perspective, hypothesize how much shorter the USSR’s life span would have been had Soviet citizens such accessibility to information and contact.

Returning to the present: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will not make the grave error of showing empathy and a willingness to negotiate. He watched the Shah do so in late 1978 and then witnessed the opposition remorselessly go for emperor’s jugular. Tragically, he and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps will probably soon respond with as much torturous and murderous brutality as necessary to quell the streets. As effective as that tactic may be, it could drive Iranians to nationwide strikes, an especially effective maneuver that worked effectively in the late 70s. Should the wheels of the economy halt, then perhaps a more conciliatory tack may be taken by the Supreme Leader.

Considerations of the waning years of the Soviet Union are warranted, much more so reflections on the Arab Spring. Not only are more and more citizen becoming gravely dissatisfied with their government’s rule, but some regime elites (perhaps even Rouhani himself) see the system as untenable. Challenged are the merits of regional power projection at the price of their most pressing domestic needs. The economic model is hollow, and the regime’s ideology is bankrupt.

Time is on the side of Iran’s opening. Those who participated in the ’79 Revolution and the hundreds of thousands more who lost their beloved in the barbaric war with Iraq that followed are slowly passing on. Replacing them are generations with no connection to those sacrifices, instead staring at the dysfunction surrounding them, detached from their forefathers’ emotional baggage. They will unequivocally demand a different kind of life. And I’ll wager that a technocrat will lead them. But it will be a bit longer for the next revolution’s uploads.

About the author:
*Richard Kraemer is a Fellow of FPRI’s Eurasia Program and formerly senior program officer for Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey at the National Endowment for Democracy. Previously, he oversaw projects in the aforementioned countries and the Levant at the Center for International Private Enterprise. Earlier, he further taught and researched at the Jagellonian University in Poland. He is also an affiliated expert of the Public International Law and Policy Group, having advised the governments of Georgia and Montenegro.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

George Weah, Liberia’s president-elect, declared the country open to investment and pledged to tackle entrenched corruption, in his first speech to the nation since decisively winning an election on December 30, 2017.

Speaking at a press conference at his party headquarters, Weah thanked his predecessor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, for enabling Liberia’s first democratic transition in over 70 years but said he was determined to usher in sweeping changes.

Weah, 51, faces sky-high expectations from young supporters who are desperate for jobs and better wages.

“You’ve got a very marginal, small group of people who are doing exceedingly well and then a large majority who are just barely scraping by,” Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian academic, told Al Jazeera.

“A large population of the under 35-year-olds are the ones who showed up in large numbers to elect Weah,” she said.

Weah faces the messy reality of reviving an economy gutted by low prices for chief exports rubber and iron ore and dwindling donor support. Unlike Sirleaf’s 35 years of global experience, his only experience in government office has been his three years as a senator, representing Monrovia, a time during which his opponents criticized him for failing to speak up during legislative sessions.

President-elect Weah emerged from the Monrovia neighborhood of Gibraltar with an uncanny ability to weave behind a soccer ball all the way up the pitch, and eventually gained fame as a world-class striker for the Italian team A.C. Milan. He won the soccer world’s greatest individual honour, the Ballon d’Or, and was named by FIFA, soccer’s governing body, as the African Player of the Century.

He never got to compete in the World Cup, because Liberia was engulfed by civil war, instigated by President Charles Taylor, during the height of Weah’s soccer years and was unable to muster up 10 other players good enough to qualify.

Weah and Vice President-elect Jewel Howard-Taylor will take office later this month.

By Stansfield Smith*

Evo Morales will soon have been the president of Bolivia for 12 years, heralding the ascent of the indigenous social movements to governmental power. This ended the apartheid system against the indigenous that existed for 500 years in Bolivia. Morales won in 2005 with 53.7% of the vote, followed by re-elections in 2009 with 64.2% and 2014 with 61.3%.

The country has made great strides in economic development, national sovereignty, women’s and Original Peoples’ rights, respect for Mother Earth, raising the people’s standard of living, level of education, and health care.

His presidency, which has brought an era of relative social peace and economic growth, has been the longest in Bolivia’s history. Since 1825, Bolivia has had 83 presidents with 37, almost half, by means of coup d’etat. Previous presidents typically lacked social legitimacy, representing a political system that excluded participation of the indigenous peoples, plagued by social and economic inequality, subjugated to foreign interests, and complicit with the looting of natural resources. By 2002, after years of neoliberal regimes serving foreign, mostly U.S. corporations, the proportion of the rural population living in extreme poverty had risen to 75%.

The election of “Evo,” a campesino movement leader and head of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS), began what his government describes as the “Process of Change” that shifted power away from Bolivia’s traditional elite, the mostly white owners of industry and agriculture, and toward the majority, the mostly indigenous workers and campesinos.

Reflecting on the historic significance of the changes underway in Bolivia, Morales declared: “We are the indigenous blood of Mother Earth. Until now Bolivia has been ruled by a few families that have all the political and economic power. They despise, humiliate, marginalize and hate the majority of the indigenous population.” “After 525 years of colonization, we indigenous peoples are part of the construction of a new Plurinational State and we have full participation in international political organizations and forums.”

Why Has Economic Development Been so Successful During the Process of Change

The MAS government undertook an anti-neoliberal program, which has enabled the economy to grow an average 5% per year since 2006, compared to 2.8% during the years 1951-2005. As a result, the Gross Domestic Product has grown four-fold from $9 billion in 2005 to $36 billion today. Bolivia has become the fastest growing economy in Latin America.

Economic strategy focused on regaining national sovereignty over the country’s natural resources and using this wealth not to enrich foreign multinationals but to raise the standard of living of the neglected people of Bolivia. In 2006 Evo Morales asserted public ownership over the country’s gas and oil resources, making foreign companies turn over extractive industry resources to the state. The state now fully controls sales, transport and distribution as well as key decisions regarding the extraction and refining of raw materials. The nationalization decree also forced foreign oil companies to renegotiate contracts with the new administration. Today, foreign corporations still extract most of Bolivia’s natural gas, but do so as contractors hired by the state, on the state’s terms.

Prior to the nationalizations (not only of gas and oil, but telecommunications, water, electricity, and a number of mines), foreign corporations pocketed about 85% of the profits generated by natural gas production. Morales increased the country’s profit share from gas from about 15% before his presidency to between 80-90%.[i] In 2005, before nationalization, government gas revenues totaled $0.6 billion; in 2015 it was over four times as much, $2.6 billion – in fact down from $4.5 billion in 2014. In 2015 all gas and oil revenues yielded $4 billion, making up nearly half of Bolivia’s export earnings.

Over ten years, Evo’s Bolivia has gained $31.5 billion from the nationalizations, compared to a mere $2.5 billion earned during the previous ten years of neoliberal policies. This vastly increased revenue, largely used to benefit the people, starkly exemplifies the extent the people have been robbed to serve foreign corporate interests.

By the end of 2013 the state-owned portion of the economy reached 35%, double that of previous neoliberal governments. The state has become the main generator of wealth, and public investment amounted to over $5 billion in 2016, compared to a mere $629 million in 2006. Much of this new revenue funds the country’s impressive development, infrastructure, community projects, such as schools, gyms, clinics, roads, and subsidies for agricultural production. It is spent on the people’s health and education, on price controls for staple foods, on wage increases, and social security benefits.

This humane redistribution of national wealth away from corporate interests to serving the poor majority has allowed one in five Bolivians, two million people, to escape a life of poverty. Even the World Bank has recognized the country as world champion in income growth for the poorest 40% of its population.

In the United States, the government is taking the opposite course, turning its back on the poor. Here the poverty has grown over the same period, from 12.3% to 12.7%.[ii] Vacant homes number 18,600,000 – enough for each homeless person to have 6. The government cut food stamps by $8.7 billion in 2014, cut 500,000 poor from the program in 2016, with plans to slash $19.3 billion per year for ten years. Yet Washington increases the military budget this year by $80 billion, an amount that could make public college free.

For Bolivia to industrialize and diversify the economy, to move away from dependence on natural resource exports, is a difficult long-term task. The country did create 485,000 jobs in the productive sector between 2006-2010, and developed industries to process natural resources.[iii] It advanced significantly its agricultural production, now providing 95% of the country’s food. Yet raw materials still account for 90% of Bolivia’s exports.

Big investments are underway in infrastructure construction, hydrocarbon exploration, industrialization of natural gas (for fertilizers and plastics), more lithium production, and electric power for export. “Here we have the presence of China, with cooperation without pre-conditions, with credit without conditions,” Evo Morales said, contrasting Chinese aid to Western aid.

New Social Programs to Eliminate Poverty

In Bolivia under Morales, poverty has declined from 60.6% of the population in 2005 to 38.6% in 2016. Extreme poverty (those living on less than $1.25 per day) fell from 38% to 16.8%. The real minimum wage has risen from 440 bolivars a month to 2,000 a month (from $57 to $287). Unemployment stands at under 4%, the lowest in Latin America, down from 8.5% in 2005.

Here are some of the measures to combat poverty:

1. Electricity has been brought to 66% of rural homes by 2015, up from 25% in 2001.
2. Over 127,000 homes have been created for low income Bolivians who lack housing. Another 23,000 homes will be built in 2018.
3. The Juancito Pinto program aims to increase school attendance and reduce child labor. It presently reaches 2 million children, who each receive $28 annually upon finishing their school year.
4. The Juana Azurduy program combats maternal and infant mortality, as well as malnutrition in children under two years old. Mothers can receive up to $266 from the program. UNICEF has pointed out the effectiveness of these social programs. Chronic undernourishment in children has sharply fallen from 27%, when the program started in 2009 to 16% now, and infant mortality has been cut in half just since 2008.
5. The Renta de la Dignidad is a payment to the 900,000 Bolivians over 60 years old, who would otherwise receive no pension. Incapacitated and disabled people now receive 250 bolivianos ($36) monthly and guaranteed job placement in public and private institutions.

More than 4.8 million Bolivians – in a country of just over 10 million – today benefit from these programs, programs that not just combat poverty, but improve public health and education.

Meanwhile in the United States, the bottom 90% of households are poorer today than they were in 1987.

Bolivia has cut income inequality by two-thirds, with the share of income of the top 10% vis-à-vis the poorest 10% has dropped from 128 to 1 in 2005 to 37 to 1 in 2016.

In the United States, after years of neoliberal programs, we have the shocking fact that the three richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population.

Gains for Rights of Original Peoples

The country, after a national discussion initiated by Bolivia’s five main indigenous campesino organizations, adopted a new constitution. The new document recognized Bolivia as a Plurinational State, with equal status and autonomy for Original Peoples, and also reclaimed control over natural resources. The new government has even established a Ministry of Decolonization (with a Depatriarchalization Unit) to further the uprooting of the previous apartheid system. By 2011, 90 of the 166 elected representatives of the national assembly came directly from the ranks of the progressive social movements.[iv]

Gains in Education and Health Care

Bolivia had an illiteracy rate of 13% when Evo Morales became president. After a mass literacy campaign that used Cuba’s YES I CAN program, 850,000 were educated and by 2008 Bolivia was declared free of illiteracy. The country is second to Cuba in Latin America in terms of funding education. There are now 16,000 educational establishments in the country, 4,500 of them were built since 2006 with the funds from the nationalized gas industry.

Life expectancy of Bolivians during Morales’ presidency has increased from 64 years to 71 years. This is partly the result of the almost 700 members of the Cuban medical brigade working in the country. Cuba’s Operation Miracle has also enabled 676,000 Bolivians to have had their vision restored. Moreover, around 5,000 Bolivians have obtained their medical degrees in Cuba, going back to their country to provide their services. The country now has 47 new hospitals and over 3,000 health centers being built.

Land Distribution and Food Self-Sufficiency

Before Evo became president, 5% of property owners owned 70% of the arable land.[v] From 2006-2010 over 35 million hectares of land (one third of Bolivia), was handed over to Original Peoples’ peasant communities to be run communally. This included government lands, large estates, and forest. Another 21 million hectares previously occupied illegally by large landowners were declared public lands, mostly protected forests.[vi] The land reform law expropriated underutilized lands, and permitted seizure of property from landowners employing forced labor or debt peonage. In all, approximately 800,000 low-income peasants have benefited. Of those who received titles to their land, 46% have been women. For the first time since the European conquest, smallholders control 55% of all land. The government ensures that these small producers receive preferential access to equipment, supplies, loans, and state subsidized markets, key factors in enabling the country to become self-sufficient in food.

U.S. Interference and Regime Change Attempts

As John Perkins points out in Confessions of an Economic Hitman, any government pursuing anti-neoliberal economic policies or its own foreign policy independent of the United States, as the case with Rafael Correa’s Ecuador and Morales’ Bolivia, becomes a U.S. target for overthrow.

Evo Morales has become one of Washington’s most disfavored leaders in the Americas. Washington continues to be concerned about Evo revolutionizing the indigenous movements in the region, and tries to tarnish his reputation as an indigenous movement leader.

Wikileaks documents show that the United States tried to undermine the presidencies of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa even before they were elected. Right after Evo’s inauguration, the U.S. ambassador made it clear to him that funding by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank and IMF depended on his “good behavior,” that is: back off nationalizing Bolivia’s petroleum resources. [vii] When Morales rejected these “orders,” including naming government ministers and military leaders without seeking prior U.S. embassy consent, Washington began financing Bolivian opposition groups seeking to overthrow the indigenous government.

Washington used USAID, NED [National Endowment for Democracy], IDB, World Bank, and IMF, to take punitive measures such as vetoing multilateral loans, postponing talks on alleviating Bolivia’s foreign debts, and discouraging international loans and grants. U.S. Ambassador Greenlee wrote in a cable, in January 2006, just months after Morales’ election, “U.S. assistance, the largest of any bilateral donor by a factor of three, is often hidden by our use of third parties to dispense aid with U.S. funds.” He noted “many USAID-administered economic programs run counter to the direction the GOB [Government of Bolivia] wishes to move the country.”

U.S. embassy cables showed Washington sought to create divisions in the social and indigenous movements that make up the support base of the country’s first indigenous-led government. Despite recognizing these were “traditionally confrontational organizations” vis-a-vis the United States, Greenlee believed that “working more closely with these social sector representatives” who expressed dissent towards Morales “seems to be most beneficial to [U.S. government] interests”.

USAID poured at least $85 million into Bolivia. Initially, the United States hoped to destabilize the government by training the separatists in the richer Santa Cruz area in the eastern lowlands. USAID money flowed to groups in these opposition-based areas, as part of “USAID’s larger effort to strengthen regional governments as a counter-balance to the central government.” [viii]

Soon these eastern regions, the Media Luna, were in open rebellion, demanding a referendum on autonomy. Resulting protests led to the killing of at least 20 MAS supporters who had mobilized to crush the rebellion. The separatists’ goal was to divide Bolivia into two separate republics: a poor one governed by an indigenous majority and a much wealthier one run by European descendants in the areas home to the gas transnationals and large agribusiness.

The United States never denounced opposition violence, not even after the massacre of the MAS supporters. Moreover, the U.S. Embassy knew in advance of the opposition plans to blow up gas lines, but did not report it, nor even attempt to dissuade the opposition from doing so.[ix]

Morales was soon to expel U.S. Ambassador Goldberg for his interference. Nevertheless, USAID “still channeled at least $200 million into the country since 2009.” USAID was eventually expelled in 2013.

Once the Media Luna separatist plan collapsed,[x] USAID switched to courting indigenous communities by using environmental NGOs. The Aymaras – Morales is one — and Quechuas, Bolivia’s two largest indigenous peoples, live mostly in the highlands and central regions. The east is home to the remaining 34 indigenous peoples. In 2011 new anti-government protests in the east again arose, this time around a planned TIPNIS highway.

Protests against the Government around the TIPNIS (Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory)

The Bolivian government planned to build a highway – actually to widen, pave and connect two roads with a 20-40 mile new connector – going through the TIPNIS. Western funded NGOs along with some local indigenous groups organized an international campaign against the MAS government, claiming Evo was repressing the indigenous and destroying untouched nature. This campaign was partly funded by USAID and received sympathetic reporting in NACLA, UpsideDownWorld, Amazon Watch, and other liberal-left alternative media, which either omitted or discounted the U.S. role. Avaaz [xi] and allied NGOs in solidarity with the protest groups organized international petition of protest. This foreign interference served to exacerbate a resolvable internal Bolivian dispute.

Fred Fuentes and Cory Morningstar wrote several exposés of this Western campaign against Evo, the covering up of the facts surrounding the TIPNIS road and the protests, including the USAID funding.[xii] Evo Morales even revealed transcripts of phone calls between the anti-highway march organizers and U.S. embassy officials, including calls right before the march set out.

That the TIPNIS protest leaders supported the REDD (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), which would give Western NGOs and these indigenous groups funds for monitoring TIPNIS forests, was also not mentioned by liberal-left alternative media. REDD uses poor nations for carbon offsets so corporations in rich countries can continue polluting.

Many Western solidarity activists uncritically supported the anti-highway march. Many of their articles about the issue downplayed and made no mention of connections between the protest leaders and Washington and the Santa Cruz right wing. Eventually the issue was resolved through a consultation process, and 55 of the 69 TIPNIS indigenous communities agreed to the road.[xiii]

U.S. Manipulation Helped Cause Morales’ Loss in the 2016 Constitutional Referendum

The United States again intervened to influence the February 21, 2016 referendum to change the constitution to allow Evo Morales to run again for the presidency. A smear campaign against him took place, including false stories of his corruption, nepotism, and fathering a child with a lover, which led to him losing the vote. The day is now recognized as the “Day of the Lie.” On the 2017 anniversary, mobilizations around the country backed the Process of Change and rejected the previous year’s vote. Washington is already at work to block his renomination in 2019.

USAID and NED Funding of Oppositional Forces

According to Bolivia’s Cabinet Chief Juan Ramon Quintana, from 2006-2015 NED funded around 40 institutions in Bolivia including economic and social centers, foundations and non-governmental organizations, for a total of over $10 million. For 2013, the combined NED and USAID allocations for Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia totaled over $60 million, with the bulk of these funds destined to Cuba and Ecuador.

The Issue of “Extractivism” in Bolivia

Linda Farthing notes that in world colonial and neocolonial history, “the exploitation of [Bolivia’s] considerable natural resources has also been nearly unparalleled.” It included Spain’s richest gold and silver mine, one the richest tin mines, two of today’s largest silver and iron ore mines, half of the world’s lithium, and South America’s second largest gas reserves. She adds, “It comes as no surprise that Bolivia’s history and environment have been dominated by relentless extraction.”

A central challenge facing Latin American governments is overcoming this dependency on raw material exports to a world market controlled by Western powers. This issue, who some present as “extractivism,” has become one of the main points of liberal-left and environmental NGO criticism of the positive changes in both Evo’s Bolivia and Correa’s Ecuador.

“Extractivism” is a deliberately politically neutral and ahistorical term that conceals the brutal history that created the present First World-Third World system. “Extractivism” glosses over what has been 500 years of mass murder of Original Peoples, their slavery and semi-slavery for the purpose of plundering their gold, silver and other natural resources.

The Third World remains dependent on raw material exports, with their economies fragmented into specialized extractive industries geared towards a world market controlled by the First World, alongside backward, low-tech domestic industries and a bloated informal sector.

Bolivia cannot compete in industrial production with countries with more modern institutions, citizens with a higher educational level, developed infrastructure, and with access to the sea. To break free from being a low-cost provider of raw materials, whether mineral or agricultural, will be a long process.

As Fred Fuentes notes, the question of “extractivism” centers on how a Third World country like Bolivia can overcome centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism to provide its people with basic services while trying to respect the environment. The main culprits are not Bolivian, but the Western governments and their corporations. Defenders of the indigenous and Bolivia must demand the West pay its ecological debt and transfer the necessary technology for sustainable development to countries such as Bolivia. “Until this occurs, activists in rich nations have no right to tell Bolivians what they can and cannot do to satisfy the basic needs of their people. Otherwise, telling Bolivian people that they have no right to a highway or to extract gas to fund social programs (as some NGOs demanded), means telling Bolivians they have no right to develop their economy or fight poverty.”

Environmental Achievements

Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Linera points out that Bolivia contributes 0.1% of the world’s greenhouse gases, but its trees clean 2% of the world’s carbon dioxide, resupplying that as oxygen. He attacks the Western “colonial, elitist environmental NGOs” for imposing their environmental demands on the Third World, saying they are blind to the Third World’s right to development.

Fuentes called out Western so-called defenders of Bolivia’s environment who attack Evo Morales over extractivism, for not devoting a single article on how the government has drastically cut deforestation 64% between 2010-2013. He asked, “why have media outlets, seemingly so concerned about Bolivia’s environment, failed to investigate what might be the steepest reduction in greenhouse gas emission per capita of any country in the world?”

They also do not mention that in South America, Bolivia has the greatest number of trees per inhabitant. Peru has 1,500, Brazil 1,400, Argentina 1,200, Colombia 1000, Ecuador, 600, Paraguay 2, 500. Bolivia has 5,400. And this year they will plant another 5 million.

Misrepresenting the Morales government’s environmental record often aims to delegitimize Morales’ position not only as a leading spokesperson for the indigenous but in the global fight against climate change. Evo has rejected the carbon offset REDD schemes many Western environmental NGOs supported and clearly blames global warming on the First World’s capitalist operations. “I’m convinced that capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity and the environment, enemy of the entire planet.” He has demanded the Western rich countries repay their climate debt by transfer of technology and funds to the Third World.

Bolivia as a center of anti-imperialist social movements

The Bolivian government has sought to build political alliances with other governments and social movements in order to help strengthen the global forces for fundamental change. Liberal-left critics of Evo Morales, who attack him around TIPNIS, “extractivism,” even for being a neoliberal, so often willing to offer a checklist of measures for how Bolivian socialism should be built, so often willing to portray Evo Morales as backtracking after he took office, tend to go mum on his anti-imperialist measures, conferences, and statements.

Evo Morales has become an outspoken world leader against U.S. hegemony and has pushed hard to make Bolivia a center of anti-imperialist social movements. Bolivia organized a number of international conferences: People’s Summit on Climate Change (2010), Anti-imperialist and Anticolonial Summit of the Peoples of Latin America and the World (2013), Anti-Imperialist International Trade Union Conference (2014), the G77 Summit of 133 Third World nations (2014), the key promotor of the United Nations’ World Conference on Indigenous Peoples (2014), World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Defense of Life (2015), World Conference of the Peoples For a World Without Borders towards Universal Citizenship (2017).

He has called for rich countries to pay climate reparation to those poorer ones suffering the effects of climate change. Warning of a coming “climate holocaust” that will destroy parts of Africa and many island nations, he called for an international climate court of justice to prosecute countries for climate crimes.

In 2016 he inaugurated a military “Anti-Imperialist Commando School,” saying “We want to build anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thinking with this school that binds the armed forces to social movements and counteracts the influence of the School of the Americas that always saw the indigenous as internal enemies.”

Besides expelling the U.S. ambassador and USAID for their roles in coup plotting, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was expelled in 2009 for its actions against social organizations and for interfering with the actual struggle against narcotrafficking.

Evo Morales’ anti-cocaine program has resulted in land used for coca production being reduced by one-fifth since 2005. [xiv] The OAS considers Bolivia’s program “a best practice…[worthy of] replication”; it is also praised by the UN Office of Drug Control. The DEA’s military base was transformed into the Cochabamba airport and renamed Soberania [Sovereignty].

“I am pleased to have expelled the U.S. ambassador, the Drug Enforcement Administration and to have closed the U.S. military base in Bolivia. Now, without a U.S. ambassador, there is less conspiracy, and more political stability and social stability.” And in reference to the IMF and World Bank, which had served to force Bolivia to divert funds away from social welfare programs, he added “Without the International Monetary Fund, we are better off economically.”

Speaking of the United States’ $700 billion military budget, Morales said “”If that money was used for cooperation or to fight poverty, we could solve so many [of the world’s social and environmental] problems.” Instead, “The U.S. creates and perpetuates international conflicts for profit….The capitalist system that [it] represents is not a policy that embodies the people of the United States but a policy of the transnational corporations, especially those that commercialize weapons and push for an arms race…they use any pretext against the anti-imperialist countries to subdue and dominate them politically and rob them economically. They’re after our natural resources.”

Challenges Facing The Process of Change

Evo has said that “the retreat of the left in Latin America is due to the incapacity of progressive governments to face a media war and the lack of political training of the youth”. Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera also pointed out that progressive governments have failed to promote a kind of cultural revolution alongside the political revolution; social programs have successfully lifted many out of poverty, creating a new middle class with new consumerist attitudes, without promoting a corresponding new value system; progressive governments must do more to tackle the entrenched corruption of the neoliberal years; the question of the continuity of leadership remains a challenge; and Latin American economic integration remains a weakness despite considerable advances in political regional integration.

Three factors may cause Bolivia’s Process of Change to stagnate and be partially reversed. It has not moved beyond anti-neoliberalism policies, that have brought great benefits to the people, in a more anti-capitalist direction. While the MAS government has democratized the traditional Bolivian state, it has modified this bourgeois state but not replaced it with a new one that would be a superior tool for the indigenous campesino and working people to advance their struggle. It has not built an organization of activists committed to leading this struggle with the people.

Now coming on 12 years of the Process of Change, Bolivia is a new country under the leadership of Evo Morales and Garcia Linera. Each passing year is one more of social, political and economic transformation, of opening up national decision-making to the indigenous communities, peasant and worker social movements. Not only have the faces of those who govern radically changed, but the country itself. From one of the poorest countries in Latin America, it has become the leader in sustained economic growth. From a country founded on social exclusion to the point of apartheid, it has become a country of inclusion for all, where more than half the Congress consists of women, where illiteracy is eliminated, where the people have free health care and education, and have gained much greater control over the wealth of their natural resources.

*Stansfield Smith, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Notes:
[i] Linda Farthing gives different figures: “the total government take shot up to about 70 percent of production, making gas its primary income source with annual revenues jumping from $332 million before nationalization to more than $2 billion today.”

[ii] These figures understate the actual figure as they exclude the 12 million undocumented, who are disproportionately poor.

[iii] Federico Fuentes, “Bad Left Government” vs “Good Social Movements”? in Steve Ellner (ed.) Latin America’s Radical Left, Maryland:Rowman & Littlefield (2014) p. 110

[iv] Federico Fuentes « Bolivia’s Communitarian Socialism », Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions, Halifax, Winnepeg:Fernwood Publishing; London, NewYork: Zed Books (2013) p. 86

[v] Dangl, Ben, “The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia,” California: AK Press (2007) p.95

[vi] Federico Fuentes, Federico Fuentes « Bolivia’s Communitarian Socialism », Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions, Halifax, Winnepeg:Fernwood Publishing; London, NewYork: Zed Books (2013) p. 85

[vii] The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire, London, New York: Verso (2015) p. 504

[viii] Ibid., p. 507; quote is from a US government cable. See also https://sputniknews.com/latam/201602191035028066-bolivia-wikileaks-us-funding-separatists/

and El informe de 2007 de la USAID

[ix] The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire, (2015: 508). “The US had full knowledge of opposition groups’ terrorist plans, and yet did not denounce them,” Eirik Vold [author of Ecuador In the Sights: The WikiLeaks Revelations and the Conspiracy Against the Government of Rafael Correa] told Prensa Latina, adding that the US had prior knowledge of a planned attack on a natural gas pipeline, which resulted in a ten percent decrease in Bolivia’s in gas exports to Brazil.”

[x] The Media Luna attempted coup broke under the pressure of several Latin American anti-neoliberal governments (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador y Nicaragua) issued a declaration in support of Bolivia’s constitutional government. Nevertheless the US continued to maintain constant communication with the leaders of the separatist movement.

[xi] It included 61 signers, only two from Bolivia. US signers included Amazon Watch, Biofuelwatch, Democracy Center, Food and Water Watch, Global Exchange, NACLA, Rainforest Action Network.

[xii] Fred Fuentes, “Bad Left Government” versus “Good Left Social Movements”? in Latin America’s Radical Left (2014) pp. 120-121

[xiii] Linda C. Farthing, Benjamin H. Kohl Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change, Austin, University of Texas Press (2014) pp. 52-54

[xiv] Drug seizures have almost tripled under Evo, Informe Presidencial, 22 de enero 2017 http://www.embolivia.org.br/UserFiles/File/PDFs/emb_inf2017.pdf p. 12

By Dr Subhash Kapila

Strategic utility of a smaller nation to that of a major power lies in its credibility, usefulness and loyal effectiveness to serve the national security interests of its strategic patron and that in case of Pakistan seems to have faded as far as the United States is concerned with Pakistan having decidedly opting for the China-Pakistan Axis.

Pakistan had for decades back opted for China as its strategic patron in preference to the United States but went through the façade of a staunch American ally while double-timing the United States over Afghanistan. Successive US Presidents were aware of it in this century but both the United States and Pakistan let political expediencies to prevail. In case of Pakistan Army, the decision-maker of Pakistan’s foreign policy, a ‘Hedging Strategy’ against the United States was necessary till its alternatively preferred strategic patron China emerged more powerful enough to challenge US power and influence.

For the United States, I believe, Pakistan hosting China through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Gwadar Port was proof enough that Pakistan had strategically fled the American coop. China’s increasing siding of Pakistan over Afghanistan and Pakistan’s lack of sincerity to reciprocate US military aid which was Afghanistan-centric by seriously serving US interests possibly has led to United States final denouement with Pakistan.

Pakistan defiantly ignoring United States repeated advisories to Pakistan in 2017 to reign in Pakistan Army terrorist affiliates inflicting havoc on Afghanistan’s security to the detriment of US national interests seems to have led the Trump Administration to the conclusion that Pakistan and the Pakistan Army have ceased to be useful assets in the American strategic calculus.

Pakistan in 2018 finally seems to have lost its relevance and credibility in United States strategic calculus after decades of its centricity in US policy formulations on South Asia and this in my assessment should not be read as related only to US frustrations with Pakistan’s Afghanistan related policies but also to Pakistan’s geopolitical pivot to China-Pakistan –Russia Trilateral as a follow-up to the China-Pakistan Axis.

Pakistan Army in recent past seems to have read geopolitics wrongly by a policy pivot to the China-Pakistan-Russia Trilateral oblivious to the fact that both China and Russia were earlier perceived as inimical to US security and in National Security Strategy 2017 issued by President Trump, China and Russia have virtually been designated as adversarial to the United States national security, power and influence,

Pakistan Army therefore in 2018 has placed Pakistan in the camp of United States military adversaries both in terms of the Afghanistan issue and also in terms of global geopolitics of balance of power.

It is for nothing that China continues to block in the United Nations the designation of Pakistani terrorist leader Jaish-e-Mohamed Chief as a global terrorist. It was nothing that China was the only nation maintaining links with the Taliban regime in Kabul and thereafter. It was China’s quid-pro-quo payments to Pakistan Army for furthering China’s national security interests in South Asia at the expense of both India earlier and now the United States more pointedly.

Pakistan Army’s ingenuity for inventing its strategic utility to the United States seems to have finally run out in 2018 as with no time lines to achieve results in Afghanistan by US Forces, the United States is not hustled into short-term politically expedient dependence on Pakistani lines of communication to sustain US presence in Afghanistan.

United States-Pakistan relations as 2018 commences seemed to have nose-dived as reflected in US President Trump’s first tweet of 2018 accusing Pakistan of having given United States “nothing but lies and deceit, thinking that our leaders as fools” and this despite that the United States had pumped into Pakistan $ 33 billion over the last 15 years.

The United States admonishments to Pakistan Army to do more in terms of not destabilising Afghanistan’s stability have been rebuffed by Pakistan dismissively saying that it cannot do anything more. More defiantly the Pakistan Army spokesperson, a Lieutenant General, warned the United States against any unilateral military intervention in Pakistan’s border areas with Afghanistan. It needs to be recalled that these Pakistan borderlands with Pakistan host the launch pads and safe havens of the terrorist groups and Haqqani Brothers creating havoc in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s relations with the United States have nose-dived after President Trump came into power and more especially from August 2017 onwards when the Trump Administration perceived that despite more than enough nudging by the United States for Pakistan to rein-in Pakistan Army’s affiliated terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, and specifically the Haqqani Brothers terrorist group. Pakistan Army had used these terrorist assets in the past deceitfully against US Forces and lately to devastating effect against US national security interests in restoring security and stability in Afghanistan.

Pakistan Army has not taken kindly to President Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy enunciated in latter half of 2017 which not only embarks on limited UUS Forces surge in Afghanistan but also removes all time lines to achieve stability in Pakistan and ensuring that capacity building of Afghanistan security forces is effected to equip them to be more self-reliant in achieving stability and security.

United States recent declarations at the highest levels that the United States intends “to stay put” in Afghanistan till full security and stability is restored clashes directly with Pakistan Army’s obsession to regain proxy control over Kabul through its terrorist affiliates and the Taliban and possibly other Islamic Jihadi groups.

Geopolitically, a number of developments goaded the Pakistan Army into pivoting to the China-Pakistan-Russia Trilateral in the recent past. This stood periodically reflected in my SAAG Papers on Afghanistan. The geopolitical developments which the Pakistan Army as the main policy decision-maker perceived as working against Pakistan’s interest were (1) US-India Strategic Partnership growing more proximate and stronger (2) United States giving a stake to India in the future of Afghanistan both as reconstruction donor and also capacity-building of Afghan security forces (3) US recognition of India as a regional power and a global leading power with India’s growing national power attributes.

Against the above geopolitical backdrop a number of questions emerge in relation to Pakistan’s utility in the United Sates strategic calculus reading the strong pressures by the United States on the Pakistan Army to deliver in terms of not only stopping Pakistan-based terrorist groups operating against Afghanistan from Pakistani safe havens but also reining in and eradicating all terrorism operating from Pakistani soil, and that includes against India too.

Some of the more major questions that need to be examined are (1) Can Pakistan Army effectively resist US demands stated above? (2) Can Pakistan receive assistance from China and Russia in confronting the United States especially if the United States undertakes limited military operations against Pakistani terrorist havens in Pakistan’s areas bordering Afghanistan? (3) Will Pakistan continue to be factored-in in the US strategic calculus in the years to come? (4) Can the United States logistically maintain its forces in Afghanistan; what are the options?

The question of Pakistan Army resisting US pressures to deliver on its demands is debatable. The Pakistan Army can continue to prevaricate in terms of results expected by the United Sates. The Pakistan Army going by past records can proceed on a double-game of rendition of some low-level terrorist to United Sates but keep dilly dallying on the Haqqani Brothers. The Pakistan Army hierarchy may acquiesce to a limited US military operation feigning ignorance and denying knowledge as it did during the raid to liquidate Osama bin Laden deep within a Pakistan Army garrison.

Pakistan would be hard-pressed to resist US pressures as the military option of a limited operation is available to the United States. Also voices are surfacing within Pakistan that Pakistan Army mange Pakistan’s relation with the United States with more wisdom than trenchant responses.

More importantly Pakistani economists have cautioned the Pakistani establishment not to annoy the United States rashly as American aid cut-offs in millions of dollars will seriously impact Pakistan’s weak economy.

In the event of a United States limited military operation in Pakistani border areas with Afghanistan it is unlikely that China or Russia can openly assist Pakistan Army, other than condemnatory rhetoric. The past example of Osama bin Laden’s liquidation by a limited Special Forces operation by the United States not drawing any substantial condemnation can be cited as example.

Pakistan will continue to be factored-in in US strategic calculus not as a strategic asset for the United States but as a nuclear state and a disruptive proxy of China. Pakistan Army hierarchy as per Pakistani columnists’ are quoted as being distrustful of US motives and policies on Pakistan. It follows that Pakistan would be factored-in as a destabilising and disruptive factor in South Asia and US interests in South Asia.

The larger question that still lingers is as to what contingency plans the United States has for alternative logistics routes for US Forces in Afghanistan? If Pakistan continues to be recalcitrant the United States has many coercive options available extending from economic sanctions, isolating Pakistan and using strategic airlifts directly and indirectly to ensure that its military presence in Pakistan is not obstructed by Pakistan. Complete cut of US aid to Pakistan will be a potent weapon.

In conclusion, the United States needs to firmly resolve and ensure that Pakistan Army, the main bane of Pakistan is brought to order and made to submit to furtherance of United States national interests. Pakistan Army boxing much above its true strategic weight s needs to be put into place and Pakistan Army cut down to size by neutralising its perceived exaggerated support accruing from China’s and Russia’s pivots to Pakistan.

By Frank Shostak*

For most economic commentators the underlying driving force of inflation is inflationary expectations1. For instance, if there is a sharp increase in the price of oil, individuals may form higher inflationary expectations that could set in motion spiraling price inflation. Or so it is held.

If expectations could somehow be made less responsive to various price shocks, then over time this would mitigate the effect of a price shock on price inflation, it is argued.

Once we accept that inflation expectations are the driving force of the inflationary process, the next step is to discover a way — using central-bank policies — to make these expectations less sensitive to various price shocks. Once this happens, then expectations have become “anchored,” and various price shocks such as sharp increases in oil or food prices are likely to be of a transitory nature. This means that over time price shocks are unlikely to have much effect on the rate of inflation.

How To “Anchor” Inflation Expectations: Inflation Targeting

To make inflation expectations well-anchored individuals must be clear about the monetary policy of central bank policy makers. If central bankers make it clear they plan to pursue a specific level of price inflation, they believe they can manage present and future expectations for inflation. On the other hand, as long as individuals are unclear about the precise goal policymakers are aiming at with respect to inflation, it will be difficult to bring inflationary expectations to a state of equilibrium.

It’s Not Really About Expectations

This is all an interesting theory, but the key factor behind inflation is not expectations — it’s growth in the money supply.

After all, without a preceding increase in money supply there cannot be general increase in prices, which is what most mainstream commentators mean when they speak of “inflation.”

A price of a good is the amount of dollars paid per unit of a good. For a given amount of goods, if the stock of money remains unchanged the amount of dollars spent per unit of a good will stay unchanged, all other things being equal.

For example, let us say that because of a sudden sharp increase in the price of oil people have formed higher inflation expectations. If the money stock remains unchanged, then no general increase in prices can take place, all other things being equal.

In this case, all that we will have here is a situation where the prices of oil and energy related goods will go up while the prices of other goods and services will go down. (If more money spent on oil and oil products obviously that less money left for other goods and services — note again a price is the amount of money per unit of a good. Only if more money is created will there be a general increase in prices.

We can conclude that changes in the money supply underpin the underlying rises in prices, and not inflationary expectations. Without the creation of new money, as augmented by central banks, all other things being equal, no general increase in price inflation can take place. Whether or not consumers expected a certain amount of inflation then becomes irrelevant.

About the author:
*Frank Shostak’s consulting firm, Applied Austrian School Economics, provides in-depth assessments of financial markets and global economies. Contact: email.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Notes:
1. Ben S. Bernanke “Inflation Expectations and Inflation Forecasting” July 10,2007, speech at the NBER.

The Trump regime proclaimed that the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a strategic US decision.

Both President Trump and his bombastic UN Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened that all decisions and agreements regarding alliances, loans, aid and diplomatic relations were at stake.

Moreover, the Trump regime clearly defined the style and substance of US imperial dictates: All UN member nations (large and small) must grovel in the most abject manner to his orders. Ambassador Haley demanded that each nation on earth accept Trump’s and the racist-Zionist Netanyahu’s declaration that the ancient city of Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided and ethnically managed capital of the Jews. Trump’s message was loud and clear – he was the great ‘decider’ and the UN votes would identify America’s true friends and enemies. “We are making a list… and there will be consequences…”

Clearly Trump’s boast of US power and Haley’s assumption that her terrifying threats would ensure that Washington had a majority vote in the ‘gifting’ of Jerusalem to Zio-fascism. They believed that US dominance and global hegemony was absolute and unassailable. The vote proved something else, something very new was happening.

The US suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat, one that kept Ambassador Haley dexterous fingers busy ‘taking notes’: 128 nations demanded that the Trump regime withdraw its declaration that Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital for Jews.

Only 9 micro-nations (some mere postage stamps and a few death-squad banana-stans) voted with the Trump-Haley decision, 35 mendicant-states put their heads down and abstained while 21 timorous ambassadors chose to hide their shamelessness in the toilet stalls rather than show up for this important vote.

Political Context

First and foremost it is important to discuss the steps leading up to the US suffering such a crushing debacle. In other words, who was responsible for leading the Trump Administration by the nose down the blind alley of submission to the dictates of Zio-fascism.

The leader and driving force behind the UN disaster was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose quest to seize Jerusalem and convert it into the ‘eternal’ capital of the Jews was his top priority. For decades the entire world has rejected Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem and its conversion into an ethnically cleansed capital for the ‘Jewish’ state. The UN and international jurists denounced Israel’s colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Netanyahu took charge with the election of Donald Trump as President. Operation Jerusalem was his first order to Puppet Donald. A number of Israel-First multi-billionaires, who financed Trump’s electoral campaign, demanded an immediate pay-off from their puppet: The Administration’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s agenda.

Despite protests from the rest of the world, especially the US closest European allies, Trump plunged the nation right into the Zionist soup: a Jewish Jerusalem; the systematic eviction of all Arabs, Christian, Muslim and secular, and the eventual annexation of all of Palestine; as well as an increasing military confrontation with Iran.

Real estate speculator, Jared Kushner, Trump’s pampered son-in- law, and a complete Netanyahu flunky, became the senior advisor for the Middle East. Kushner pressured Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn to intervene with Russia on behalf of Israel’s take-over of Jerusalem. Flynn was subsequently prosecuted for discussing global US Russian relations and the ‘good soldier’ is falling on his sword on behalf of the Zionists. Not surprising, the Congressional Democrats, the FBI and the Special Prosecutor found it easier to prosecute Flynn for his discussion regarding de-escalating the tense US- Russian relations provoked by the Obama administration than his discussions with the Kremlin in support of Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem!

Netanyahu’s operational weapons in manipulating US policy involved Jared Kushner, the billionaire Israel-First donors, the AIPAC and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Tel Aviv succeeded in securing Trump’s commitment to the Israeli agenda, despite opposition from the entire UN National Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly. In the style of a typical authoritarian, US President Trump grovels at the feet of his ‘superior’, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while tearing at the throats of his ‘inferiors’, the 193 member nations of the UN General Assembly.

Netanyahu’s vitriolic bar room threats against the entire membership of the UN prior to the vote ensured the repudiation of all Security Council representatives with the exception of his South Carolina puppet, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump and Haley backed the blustering Netanyahu by issuing gangland threats to all UN representatives who dare to oppose Washington’s dictates.

In this way, Prime Minister Netanyahu secured the greatest diplomatic and political success of his career – the total submission of the US to his agenda, at the risk of a major humiliation in the UN. This, in effect, formalized Israeli hegemony over Washington, for the world to see.

In contrast to Netanyahu’s beaming success, the US suffered a historic diplomatic defeat: Fourteen times as many nations voted against the demands of the US President over– Netanyahu’s grab of Jerusalem.

What makes the defeat even more striking is the fact that all major allies and most of the biggest aid recipients openly defied the US threats. Eight of the ten biggest US aid recipients voted against Trump–Netanyahu–Haley. This bizarre troika is now left with an enemy list circling the entire globe, and a few timorous allies in the South Pacific and among the death squads of Guatemala.

Trump’s total and puerile embrace of the raving Netanyahu has exposed and widened fissures in US global hegemony.

Apart from ‘capturing’ Netanyahu’s vote, the other pro Trump nations included a handful of insignificant Pacific islands (Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia), Togo, a corrupt African mini-state and two banana-sized ‘death squad democracies’, Honduras and Guatemala. The latter two regimes hold power via stolen elections backed by narco-thugs in the pay (dubbed ‘foreign aid’) of the US.

All of the leading Asian and Western European countries voted against Trump. They openly rejected the crude blackmail of the US-Israel duet. Subservient regimes in Eastern Europe, corrupt regimes in Latin America and some horrifically impoverished nations in Africa and Asia chose to abstain or excuse themselves to the bathrooms of Times Square. Narco-neo-liberal regimes in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic abstained. Even rightwing Eastern European regimes, which usually give unquestioned support to all US demands, like Romania, Bosnia, Poland and Latvia defied Nikki Haley’s ‘name taking’ by abstaining. The ‘no-shows’ (hiding in the toilets) included US puppets like Georgia, Samoa, St Kitts and Tonga.

An openly humiliated UN Ambassador Haley was left with the task of thanking the abstainers and ‘no-shows’ for their courage and preparing a few bags of goodies (matzos, Mogan David wine and discounts to the brothels of Tel Aviv) for the torturers of Honduras and half-drowned ‘leaders’ of Palau in gratitude for such loyalty.

Conclusion

Clearly Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel is view as a strategic diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.

Trump’s decision to demonstrate total loyalty to his Zionist billionaire campaign ‘donor- owners’ and his Israel-First son-in-law in his first major foreign policy decision failed to impress any of the influential nations of the world – East or West. Indeed, it showed how fractured and dangerously dysfunctional the US Administration had become.

Most important, Trump’s proclamation of a unipolar world based on his notion of the US’s economic power has collapsed. Israel, despite Haley’s bluster and list-taking, has no legitimacy. It’s continued Mossad assassinations of leading Palestinians and others and the increasing IDF slaughter of the spontaneous Palestinian civilian resistance has failed to improve its international standing – except among Guatemalan torturers.

However, it is not clear that the US has lost its big power influence regarding other regional conflicts. The subsequent UN Security Council vote in favor of Washington’s demands for added sanctions against North Korea demonstrated Trump’s power to intimidate the oligarchs and leaders of China and Russia.

In other words, limits on US power still depend on the issues, the allies, the diplomatic appeals, the adversaries and the distribution of benefits and costs.

In the case of Jerusalem, Real Estate Mogul Trump’s bizarre decision to hand an entire city over to the Zionists alienated all Muslims and Christians the world over, as well as the secular Western liberal nations and emerging powers, like Russia and China. The US tied its prestige to the whims of a paranoid nation arrogantly flaunting its racist superiority complex, backed by groups of immensely wealthy overseas dual citizens.

Diplomatically, Israel’s vituperative responses to any legal criticism from world bodies undermines its chances of coalition building.

Finally, Washington’s support for Israel’s perpetual and overt violation of international law and its bombing of humanitarian missions makes Israel a very costly ally.

The first study of a nationally-representative group of U.S. infants reports that more than half of babies are currently introduced to complementary foods, that is, foods or drinks other than breast milk or formula, sooner than they should be. Babies who were never breastfed or breastfed for less than four months were most likely to be introduced to foods too early.

These findings are reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and emphasize the need to introduce foods at the proper time to get the most benefit from breast milk or formula.

“Introducing babies to complementary foods too early can cause them to miss out on important nutrients that come from breast milk and infant formula. Conversely, introducing them to complementary foods too late has been associated with micronutrient deficiencies, allergies, and poorer diets later in life,” explained lead investigator Chloe M. Barrera, MPH, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA.

Current recommendations stipulate that infants should be introduced to complementary foods at around six months of age. Analyzing data from the 2009-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), investigators assessed the food intake of 1482 children aged six to 36 months, gathered during household interviews with the child’s proxy, typically a parent.

The survey asked how old infants were when they were first fed anything other than breast milk or formula. This includes juice, cow’s milk, sugar water, baby food, or anything else that the infant might have been given, even water.

This analysis shows that only one-third (32.5%) of babies in the U.S. were introduced to complementary foods at the recommended time of about six months; 16.3% were introduced to complementary foods before four months, 38.3% at four-five months, and 12.9% at seven or more months of age. These data help understand the current state of infant feeding practices in the U.S.

Over the last 60 years, recommendations for when to introduce complementary foods have changed dramatically. The 1958 guidelines suggested solid foods in the third month, the 1970s brought a delay until after four months, and the 1990s pushed the introduction of solid food out to six months.

These changing recommendations have influenced many past studies of infant nutrition, most of which show a general lack of adherence to current professional guidelines, whatever they may be. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are currently developing the first federal dietary guidelines for children under two years, to be released in 2020.

“Efforts to support caregivers, families, and healthcare providers may be needed to ensure that U.S. children are achieving recommendations on the timing of food introduction,” commented Chloe Barrera and her co-investigators from CDC. “Inclusion of children under two in the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans may promote consistent messaging of when children should be introduced to complementary foods.”

Engineers at The Ohio State University are developing technologies that have the potential to economically convert fossil fuels and biomass into useful products including electricity without emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

In the first of two papers published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the engineers report that they’ve devised a process that transforms shale gas into products such as methanol and gasoline–all while consuming carbon dioxide. This process can also be applied to coal and biomass to produce useful products.

Under certain conditions, the technology consumes all the carbon dioxide it produces plus additional carbon dioxide from an outside source.

In the second paper, they report that they’ve found a way to greatly extend the lifetime of the particles that enable the chemical reaction to transform coal or other fuels to electricity and useful products over a length of time that is useful for commercial operation.

Finally, the same team has discovered and patented a way with the potential to lower the capital costs in producing a fuel gas called synthesis gas, or “syngas,” by about 50 percent over the traditional technology.

The technology, known as chemical looping, uses metal oxide particles in high-pressure reactors to “burn” fossil fuels and biomass without the presence of oxygen in the air. The metal oxide provides the oxygen for the reaction.

Chemical looping is capable of acting as a stopgap technology that can provide clean electricity until renewable energies such as solar and wind become both widely available and affordable, the engineers said.

“Renewables are the future,” said Liang-Shih Fan, Distinguished University Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who leads the effort. “We need a bridge that allows us to create clean energy until we get there–something affordable we can use for the next 30 years or more, while wind and solar power become the prevailing technologies.”

Five years ago, Fan and his research team demonstrated a technology called coal-direct chemical looping (CDCL) combustion, in which they were able to release energy from coal while capturing more than 99 percent of the resulting carbon dioxide, preventing its emission to the environment. The key advance of CDCL came in the form of iron oxide particles which supply the oxygen for chemical combustion in a moving bed reactor. After combustion, the particles take back the oxygen from air, and the cycle begins again.

The challenge then, as now, was how to keep the particles from wearing out, said Andrew Tong, research assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State.

While five years ago the particles for CDCL lasted through 100 cycles for more than eight days of continuous operation, the engineers have since developed a new formulation that lasts for more than 3,000 cycles, or more than eight months of continuous use in laboratory tests. A similar formulation has also been tested at sub-pilot and pilot plants.

“The particle itself is a vessel, and it’s carrying the oxygen back and forth in this process, and it eventually falls apart. Like a truck transporting goods on a highway, eventually it’s going to undergo some wear and tear. And we’re saying we devised a particle that can make the trip 3,000 times in the lab and still maintain its integrity,” Tong said.

This is the longest lifetime ever reported for the oxygen carrier, he added. The next step is to test the carrier in an integrated coal-fired chemical looping process.

Another advancement involves the engineers’ development of chemical looping for production of syngas, which in turn provides the building blocks for a host of other useful products including ammonia, plastics or even carbon fibers.

This is where the technology really gets interesting: It provides a potential industrial use for carbon dioxide as a raw material for producing useful, everyday products.

Today, when carbon dioxide is scrubbed from power plant exhaust, it is intended to be buried to keep it from entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. In this new scenario, some of the scrubbed carbon dioxide wouldn’t need to be buried; it could be converted into useful products.

Taken together, Fan said, these advancements bring Ohio State’s chemical looping technology many steps closer to commercialization.

He calls the most recent advances “significant and exciting,” and they’ve been a long time coming. True innovations in science are uncommon, and when they do happen, they’re not sudden. They’re usually the result of decades of concerted effort–or, in Fan’s case, the result of 40 years of research at Ohio State. Throughout some of that time, his work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Ohio Development Services Agency.

“This is my life’s work,” Fan said.

His co-authors on the first paper include postdoctoral researcher Mandar Kathe; undergraduate researchers Abbey Empfield, Peter Sandvik, Charles Fryer, and Elena Blair; and doctoral student Yitao Zhang. Co-authors on the second paper include doctoral student Cheng Chung, postdoctoral researcher Lang Qin, and master’s student Vedant Shah. Collaborators on the pressure adjustment assembly work include Tong, Kathe and senior research associate Dawei Wang.

The university would like to partner with industry to further develop the technology.

The Linde Group, a provider of hydrogen and synthesis gas supply and plants, has already begun collaborating with the team. Andreas Rupieper, the head of Linde Group R&D at Technology & Innovation said that the ability to capture carbon dioxide in hydrogen production plants and use it downstream to make products at a competitive cost “could bridge the transition towards a decarbonized hydrogen production future.” He added that “Linde considers Ohio State’s chemical looping platform technology for hydrogen production to be a potential alternative technology for its new-built plants”.

The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W), which produces clean energy technologies for power markets, has been collaborating with Ohio State for the past 10 years on the development of the CDCL technology – an advanced oxy-combustion technology for electricity production from coal with nearly zero carbon emissions. David Kraft, Technical Fellow at B&W, stated “The CDCL process is the most advanced and cost-effective approach to carbon capture we have reviewed to date and are committed to supporting its commercial viability through large-scale pilot plant design and feasibility studies. With the continued success of collaborative development program with Ohio State, B&W believes CDCL has potential to transform the power and petrochemical industries.”

The impact of pay for performance programs in US hospitals has been “limited and disappointing” say experts in a study published by The BMJ.

Their findings show that care for older patients was no better at hospitals that had been operating under pay for performance programs for more than a decade compared with those which had only been under financial incentives for less than three years.

And they add that pay for performance programs as currently implemented are unlikely to be successful in the future, even if their timeframes are extended.

In many countries, hospitals are rewarded for better outcomes, but previous studies have found that pay for performance programs have had limited impact. However, advocates argue that it takes time for hospitals to make meaningful improvements to care under financial incentive programs.

Researchers led by Dr Igna Bonfrer at Harvard School of Public Health therefore set out to examine how hospitals that volunteered to be under financial incentives for more than a decade as part of the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (early adopters) compared with similar hospitals where these incentives were implemented later under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program (late adopters).

The study included 1,189 hospitals in the USA (214 early adopters and 975 matched late adopters). Most were medium or large, private not for profit, and based in urban areas.

Using Medicare claims data for over 1.3 million patients aged 65 years and older from 2003 to 2013, the team analysed clinical process scores (a measure of whether or not a healthcare provider gives the recommended care to patients with a particular condition) and 30 day mortality data at each hospital.

They found that early adopters started from a slightly higher baseline of clinical process scores (92) than late adopters (90). However, both groups reached a ceiling (98) a decade later.

Starting from a similar baseline, the researchers found no noticeable differences in mortality between early and late adopters for conditions targeted by the program or for conditions not targeted by the program over the study period.

The authors point out that this is an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, and add their results might not apply to the general population because the study only looked at older patients.

Nevertheless, they say: “No evidence that hospitals that have been operating under pay for performance programs for more than a decade had better process scores or lower mortality than other hospitals was found.”

These findings suggest that even among hospitals that volunteered to participate in pay for performance programs, having additional time is not likely to turn pay for performance programs into a success in the future,” they add.

They suggest policymakers should revise the program, for example by increasing the incentives and focusing on a few measures that matter most to patients.

“Given the growing worldwide interest in pay for performance programs and the unclear American health policy agenda, these findings should be considered by policymakers when assuming that programs like these simply need more time to have a meaningful effect,” they conclude.