In the wake of the shocking invasion of southern Israel by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas.

“We are fighting a cruel enemy, worse than ISIS,” Netanyahu proclaimed four days after the invasion, comparing Hamas with the Islamic State group, which was largely defeated by U.S., Iraqi and Kurdish forces in 2017.

On that same day, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant went further, stating, “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.” They were strong words, issued in the wake of the horrific terrorist attack that killed more than 1,300 Israelis and culminated in the kidnapping of more than 150 people, including several Americans.

And in a telling comparison, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan compared the attack with the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, declaring, “This is Israel’s 9/11.”

As a scholar of military history, I believe the comparison is interesting and revealing. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaida on the United States, President George W. Bush made a similar expansive pledge, declaring, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

The U.S. response to 9/11 included the American invasion of Afghanistan in league with the Afghan United Front, the so-called Northern Alliance. The immediate goals were to force the Taliban from power and destroy al-Qaida. Very little thought or resources were put into what happened after those goals were attained. In his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” former President Bush recalled a meeting of the war cabinet in late September 2001, when he asked the assemblage, “‘So who’s going to run the country (Afghanistan)?’ There was silence.”

Wars that are based on revenge can be effective in punishing an enemy, but they can also create a power vacuum that sparks a long, deadly conflict that fails to deliver sustainable stability. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, and that is what could happen in Gaza.

A war of weak results

The U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban from power by the end of 2001, but the war did not end. An interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai took power as an Afghan council of leaders, called a loya jirga, fashioned a new constitution for the country.

Nongovernmental and international relief organizations began to deliver humanitarian aid and reconstruction support, but their efforts were uncoordinated. U.S. trainers began creating a new Afghan National Army, but lack of funding, insufficient volunteers and inadequate facilities hampered the effort.

The period between 2002 and 2006 was the best opportunity to create a resilient Afghan state with enough security forces to hold its own against a resurgent Taliban. Because of a lack of focus, inadequate resources and poor strategy, however, the United States and its allies squandered that opportunity.

As a result, the Taliban was able to reconstitute its forces and return to the fight. As the insurgency gained momentum, the United States and its NATO allies increased their troop levels, but they could not overcome the weakness of the Kabul government and the lack of adequate numbers of trained Afghan security forces.

Despite a surge of forces to Afghanistan during the first two years of the Obama administration and the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban remained undefeated. As Western forces largely departed the country by the end of 2014, Afghan forces took the lead in security operations, but their numbers and competence proved insufficient to stem the Taliban tide.

Negotiations between the United States and the Taliban went nowhere, as Taliban leaders realized they could seize by force what they could not gain at the bargaining table. The Taliban entry into Kabul in August 2021 merely put an exclamation point on a campaign the United States had lost many years before.

MSNBC: “Mehdi Hasan on Israel, Gaza, and what happens next”

A goal that’s hard to achieve

As Israel pursues its response to the Hamas attack, the Israeli government would be well advised to remember the past two decades of often indecisive warfare conducted by both the United States and Israel against insurgent and terrorist groups.

The invasion of Afghanistan ultimately failed because U.S. policymakers did not think through the end state of the campaign as they exacted revenge for the 9/11 attacks. An Israeli invasion of Gaza could well lead to an indecisive quagmire if the political goal is not considered ahead of time.

Israel has invaded Gaza twice, in 2009 and 2014, but quickly withdrew its ground forces once Israeli leaders calculated they had reestablished deterrence. This strategy – called by Israeli leaders “mowing the grass,” with periodic punitive strikes against Hamas – has proven to be a failure. The newly declared goal of destroying Hamas as a military force is far more difficult than that.

As four U.S. presidential administrations discovered in Afghanistan, creating stability in the aftermath of conflict is far more difficult than toppling a weak regime in the first place.

The only successful conflict against a terrorist group in the past two decades, against the Islamic State group between 2014 and 2017, ended with both Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq reduced to rubble and thousands of men, women and children consigned to detention camps.

Israel has the capacity to level Gaza and round up segments of the population, but that may not be wise. Doing so might serve the immediate impulse of exacting revenge on its enemies, but Israel would likely receive massive international condemnation from creating a desert in Gaza and calling it peace, and thus forgo the moral high ground it claims in the wake of the Hamas attacks.

Peter Mansoor, Professor of History, General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(RFE/RL ) Shabana had a bright future ahead of her. She was studying to become a doctor and preparing to get married.

But the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 turned her life upside down. The militant group’s ban on women attending university forced her to abandon her studies. Then her fiance, who is based abroad, broke off their engagement.

Shabana, who was in her 20s, last month committed suicide in her hometown of Charikar, the provincial capital of the northern province of Parwan.

She is among the growing number of women and girls who have taken their own lives in Afghanistan, one of the few countries in the world where experts estimate that more women are committing suicide than men.

The surge in the number of female suicides in the country has been linked by experts to the Taliban’s severe restrictions on women. The hard-line Islamist group has banned women from education and most forms of employment, effectively denied them any public role in society, and imposed strict limitations on their mobility and appearance.

Although there are no official figures, Afghan mental-health professionals and foreign organizations have noted a disturbing surge in female suicides in the past two years.

“Today, women and girls make up most of the patients suffering from mental conditions in Afghanistan,” said Mujeeb Khpalwak, a psychiatrist based in Kabul.

“If we look at the women who were previously working or studying, 90 percent suffer from mental health issues now,” Khpalwak added. “They face tremendous economic uncertainty after losing their work and are very anxious about their future.”

Many Afghan women say they have been turned into virtual prisoners in their homes since the Taliban takeover. The vast majority of women are unemployed. And most say they are gripped by hopelessness.

Violence against women, meanwhile, has increased under the Taliban. The militants have scrapped legal assistance programs and special courts that were designed to combat violence against women and girls.

Forced and early marriages of teenage girls have also spiked across Afghanistan, with parents marrying off their adolescent daughters to avoid forced marriages to Taliban fighters.

Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).

In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags — like so many photographic negatives of the American flag — began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.

Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.

America the Violent

These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).

In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Vox article citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.

Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost one in five American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.

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Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind — that it would feel great to do so! — I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.

Over the past two decades, however, it’s a fact that Americans have grown ever more violent, as have our police. Mass shootings are spiking, for example. And despite the government’s longstanding preoccupation with Islamist militants, over the past decade more than 75% of politically related murders in this country have been committed by far-right extremists, just like the ones tending their fields in my region who, being white, the police would never assume to be “not from here” and so, by definition, dangerously sympathetic to extremists.

America’s Forever Wars Turn Inward

How did we get to this point of violence at home?

If you held a gun to my head (no pun intended) and demanded an answer, I’d say that our decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, as well as the launching of a “Global War on Terror,” played a major role in shaping the sort of worldview that’s now become all too American.

Since those initial invasions, after all, Pentagon spending has ballooned almost beyond imagining, being now about twice the 2000 budget in inflation-controlled dollars. Meanwhile, spending on healthcare, education, job creation, and infrastructure has increased so much more slowly. And don’t forget that, in the same years, our police became ever more strikingly militarized (on which more to come). In other words, while we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.

Another subtler reason is that most of us don’t get what violence is until we suddenly find ourselves caught up in it. In January 1973, after all, the government ended 25 years of the draft, turning our military into an “all-volunteer” force. So many decades later, most Americans don’t know anyone who’s served in our armed forces.

This, in turn, has meant that our twenty-first-century war on terror, the most prolonged set of U.S. conflicts since the Vietnam era, has been handled by volunteers who experience both longer and more frequent deployments and return home to ever fewer people who have the slightest idea what they’ve been through. As a result, many Americans are now unfamiliar with what killing people professionally does to you. Most have no idea what it’s like to see a family member return from a military deployment in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa completely changed — with a 1,000-yard stare that makes eye contact hard, a tendency to startle at loud noises, and possibly a formidable temper. For many privileged Americans fortunate not to live that life or dwell in crime-ridden neighborhoods, violence is something left to Hollywood movies until, at least, someone opens up with an automatic weapon in your local supermarket or dance hall.

No wonder it’s been so easy for Donald Trump and many others to cast blame locally rather than on the effects of the omnipresent war on terror and so many related global forces of terror that are hard to capture in political slogans. In response to his recent Justice Department election interference indictment, Trump told his supporters, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”

In a sense, he was right when it came to the government in this century. Until recently, when President Biden led the way in injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into growing a clean-energy economy domestically, American policies had overwhelmingly been directed at fighting unsuccessful wars abroad rather than creating job (or life) security here at home for the high-school educated men to whom Trump unfortunately appeals so strongly.

The War on Terror Comes Home

Yet what Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has focused on just such policies. Most notably, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein has shown how the Pentagon’s 1033 program, begun in the 1990s, funneled startling amounts of excess military equipment (sometimes right off distant battlefields), including armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles, to thousands of federal and local law enforcement agencies, including park, campus, and school police throughout the U.S.

That program grew dramatically with the post-9/11 buildup of the military-industrial complex. Police departments applying for such donations needed to explain that they would help them in the fight against drugs or terror. Chillingly, as Katzenstein notes, if police departments don’t have an obvious use for such weaponry, equipment, and vehicles, they have to find one fast, including quelling protests or executing home searches, which have increased significantly in communities of color in these years.

Under such circumstances, it becomes easier to imagine why, according to the assessments of some combat veterans, our police can now look more heavily armored than U.S. troops in foreign war zones. Officers wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests typically showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014 with K-9 units, pointing sniper rifles at peaceful protesters and using tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke bombs to disperse crowds in that small midwestern city where an unarmed black teenager had been shot and killed by a police officer several days earlier. And in the years since it’s only gotten worse nationwide.

At the same time, law enforcement of all stripes adopted a new approach called “intelligence-led policing.” The massive Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the war on terror, has also been training police from across America in counterterrorism tactics, theoretically based on preventing crime rather than responding to it.

While such a focus may sound positive, it’s helped bring the war on terror home by ensuring that the FBI and local police monitor particular ethnic, religious, and political groups — most notably, Muslim citizens and legal residents. Under far more lax standards for surveillance ushered in by laws and policies like the 2001 Patriot Act, many Muslims have been targeted without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI even hired Muslim Americans to act as informants in their own communities, in certain cases encouraging young men to profess their sympathy for Islamist extremist groups and acts of mass violence. In such a world, it shouldn’t be surprising that hate crimes, incidents of racial profiling, and discriminatory comments by public figures spiked in the years after 9/11 and only continue to rise.

Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone. And that’s just what’s happened. Civil-rights groups have documented cases in which, for instance, the FBI used sting operations to infiltrate, surveil, and target left-wing racial-justice activists during the summer of 2020 as America erupted in protest over the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.

A lawsuit filed this summer by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, alleges that a young Colorado police detective went undercover with a local racial justice organization and tried to enmesh one of its members in an entirely fabricated gun-running operation. In a related case, the FBI reportedly hired as an informant a convicted felon who encouraged two Black racial justice activists to assassinate the Colorado attorney general.

Now, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and related law enforcement agencies are focusing their surveillance more on anti-government and white supremacist groups. If terror is a hypothetical rationale for the police getting more weaponry, then anyone can manufacture it. If, on the other hand, it’s about real plans to commit acts of violence, then the overwhelming perpetrators during the Trump years were our government and the president’s right-wing extremist collaborators. In other words, you could finally say that the “terror” of the war on terror had come home to roost.

War and Nationalism

Though the start of a war may cause people to rally around their leaders, wars against something nebulous like terror or, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case, “Ukrainian Nazis,” tend to prove short-lived in their ability to unify. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country to avoid having to fight their Ukrainian neighbors who often constitute part of their extended families, while their president has called them “flies that we spit out of our mouths.”

As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.

This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.

If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Afghanistan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 28 million people – two-thirds of the population – in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has reported that four million people are acutely malnourished, including 3.2 million children under 5.

“People in Afghanistan are living a humanitarian and human rights nightmare under Taliban rule,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Taliban leadership needs to urgently reject their abusive rules and policies, and the international community needs to hold them accountable for the current crises.”

Together with decades of war, extreme weather events, and widespread unemployment, the main causes of food insecurity since the Taliban takeover have been the harsh restrictions on women and girls’ rights. The result has been the loss of many jobs, particularly the dismissal of many women from their jobs and bans on women working for humanitarian organizations, except in limited areas. Women and girls are denied access to secondary and higher education.

On December 24, 2022, the Taliban announced a ban on women working with all local and international nongovernmental organizations, including the UN, with exemptions for health, nutrition, and education. This has severely harmed women’s livelihoods, as it is impossible to determine whether women are receiving assistance if they are not involved in the distribution and monitoring processes. The crisis has disproportionately harmed women and girls, who already have more difficulty getting access to food, health care, and housing.

(The Conversation) – The second anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is fast approaching. Since then, Afghan women have been denied the most basic human rights in what can only be described as gender apartheid.

Only by labelling it as such and making clear the situation in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity can the international community legally fight the systematic discrimination against the country’s women and girls.

Erasing women from the public sphere is central to Taliban ideology. Women’s rights institutions in Afghanistan, notably the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, have been dismantled while the dreaded Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has been resurrected.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has been dissolved and the country’s 2004 constitution repealed, while legislation guaranteeing gender equality has been invalidated.

Today, Afghan women are denied a post-secondary education, they cannot leave the house without a male chaperone, they cannot work, except in health care and some private businesses and they are barred from parks, gyms and beauty salons.

Women targeted

Of the approximately 80 edicts issued by the Taliban, 54 specifically target women, severely restricting their rights and violating Afghanistan’s international obligations and its previous constitutional and domestic laws.

The Taliban appear undeterred, continuing where they left off 20 years ago when they first held power. The results of their ambitions are nearly apocalyptic.

Afghanistan is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. About 19 million people are suffering from acute food insecurity, while more than 90 per cent of Afghans are experiencing some form of food insecurity, with female-headed households and children most impacted.

Gender-based violence has increased exponentially with corresponding impunity for the perpetrators and lack of support for the victims, while ethnic, religious and sexual minorities are suffering intense persecution.

This grim reality underscores the urgent need to address how civil, political, socioeconomic and gender-based harms are interconnected.

International crime

Karima Bennoune, an Algerian-American international law scholar, has advocated recognizing gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Such recognition would stem from states’ international legal commitments to gender equality and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5 aimed at achieving global gender equality by 2030.

Criminalizing gender apartheid would provide the international community with a powerful legal framework to effectively respond to Taliban abuses. While the UN has already labelled the situation in Afghanistan gender apartheid, the term is not currently recognized under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as being among the worst international crimes.

Presenting his report at the UN Human Rights Council, Richard Bennett — the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan — stated:

“A grave, systematic and institutionalized discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and rule, which also gives rise to concerns that they may be responsible for gender apartheid.”

Criminalizing gender apartheid globally would allow the international community to fulfil its obligation to respond effectively and try to eradicate it permanently. It would provide the necessary legal tools to ensure that international commitments to women’s rights in all aspects of life are upheld.

Shaharzad Akbar, head of the Rawadari human rights group and former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, has urged the Human Rights Council to acknowledge the situation in Afghanistan as gender apartheid.

She’s noted that the “Taliban have turned Afghanistan to a mass graveyard of Afghan women and girls’ ambitions, dreams and potential.”

South African support

A number of Afghan women’s rights defenders have also called for the inclusion of gender apartheid in the UN’s Draft Convention on Crimes Against Humanity.

Most remarkably, Bronwen Levy, South Africa’s representative at the Security Council, has urged the international community to “take action against what (Bennett’s) report describes as gender apartheid, much like it did in support of South Africa’s struggle against racial apartheid.”

Elsewhere, the chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, as well as the head of its Delegation for Relations with Afghanistan, have described the “unacceptable” situation in Afghanistan as one of gender apartheid.

Whenever and wherever apartheid systems emerge, it represents a failure of the international community. The situation in Afghanistan must compel it to respond effectively to the persecution of women.

Recognizing Taliban rule as gender apartheid is not only critical for Afghans, it is equally critical for the credibility of the entire UN system. As Afghan human rights activist Zubaida Akbar told the Security Council:

“If you do not defend women’s rights here, you have no credibility to do so anywhere else.”

The Taliban’s brutal two years in power in Afghanistan have taught us that ordinary human rights initiatives, while important, are insufficient for addressing gender apartheid. The world needs resolute collective international action to end the war on women. Not in two months. Not in two years. But now.

Vrinda Narain, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last month, in response to a column I wrote for TomDispatch — one of dozens, I’m sad to say, that I’ve done on Guantánamo over these endless years — I received a surprise email: an invitation to attend a meeting at the British Parliament. A group known as the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, formed this April, was gathering for the second time. Its stated purpose is “to urge the U.S. administration to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, to ensure the safe resettlement of those approved for release, and to ensure that due process is expedited for all the remaining prisoners.” Nine members of the House of Parliament and four Members of the House of Lords have already joined the group.

Thirty men remain in custody at that infamous American prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sixteen of those detainees have finally been cleared for release; they are, that is, no longer subject to criminal charges or considered a potential danger to the United States and yet they still remain behind bars. Three other prisoners have never either been charged with a crime or cleared for release. Ten more are still facing trial, while one has been convicted and remains in custody there. For the APPG, the release of those 16 cleared detainees is a paramount goal. 

That meeting I attended included a handful of MPs from all parties, as well as leading figures from British organizations that have been supporting justice for Guantánamo’s detainees for decades. Also present were two former detainees. One was Moazzem Begg, among the first prisoners released in 2005 and repatriated to England, where he is now a senior director at CAGE, an advocacy group focused on the remaining Gitmo detainees. In 2006, he published Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, an early account of the injustices and cruelties in America’s war-on-terror prisons. The other was Mohamedou Salahi, whose book Guantánamo Diary led to the dramatic film The Mauritanian about his life at that infamous prison. A third former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, author of Don’t Forget Us Here, had been transferred from Gitmo to Serbia in 2016. Though invited to attend, his visa wasn’t approved in time. 

That meeting was but one of several recent events in which organizations outside the United States have issued detailed impassioned calls for this country to finally address the ongoing nightmare it created so long ago at Guantánamo. 

Site Visits and U.N. Reports

In April, Patrick Hamilton, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), made a site visit to Guantánamo and issued “a rare statement of alarm.” It was, as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg pointed out, the ICRC’s 146th visit to the prison since it opened in January 2002. That short statement urged American officials to address the deteriorating health of the prisoners there, concluding, “The planning for an aging population,” it concluded, “cannot afford to wait.”.

Then, in mid-June, the U.N. Human Rights Council followed up its own site visit by issuing a comprehensive, devastatingly critical report. Fionnuala Ni Aoláin, that council’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, focused on the potential war crimes and “crimes against humanity” committed against the detainees during and after their time at that island prison, now in its 21st year of existence. 

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Ni Aoláin was the perfect person for the job. She’s long defended human rights and international law, with a particular focus on issues of justice and human dignity. In 2013, she co-edited Guantánamo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective. Her 2023 report, clear, fact-based, and measured in tone, is in many ways a step above that of any of its predecessors. 

Hers was, of course, anything but the first U.N. report to address the sins of Guantánamo. In 2010, the U.N. Human Rights Council prepared a detailed report on “global practices in relation to secret detention in the context of countering terrorism.” It focused on violations of international law carried out globally, often involving exceptionally cruel treatment and outright torture. Alongside sections on countries throughout Africa and the Middle East that abused captives, the torture and misuse of prisoners in the American war on terror at CIA black sites around the world and Guantánamo Bay took center stage. The study focused special attention on the lack of accountability when it came to Americans who had implemented or abetted the mistreatment and secret detention of prisoners.

Twelve years later, in March  2022, Ni Aoláin, five years into her role as special rapporteur wrote a follow-up to the report, highlighting “the abject failure to implement the recommendations” of that study and the “tragic and profound consequences for individuals who were systematically tortured, rendered across borders, arbitrarily detained, and deprived of their most fundamental rights.” Her update “reiterates the demand that accountability, reparation, and transparency be implemented by those states responsible for these grave human rights violations.”

Now, she has issued her new 23-page report, adding significantly to the debate over liberty and security that has defined discussions over Guantánamo since its birth in January 2002.

A Singular Report

A notable distinction between this report and those that preceded it is the access the special rapporteur was granted by the Biden administration. It was, in fact, the first visit ever to Guantánamo by an independent U.N. investigator. After two decades in which administration after administration placed severe restrictions on journalists as well as non-governmental and international organizations when it came to covering that prison, the Biden administration granted Ni Aoláin remarkably full access “to former and current detention facilities and to detainees, including ‘high value’ and ‘non-high value’ detainees.”

The interviews she conducted with those still imprisoned there were both confidential and unsupervised. She was allowed to deal with “military and civilian personnel, military commission personnel, and defense lawyers.” She also “interviewed victims, survivors, and families of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, former detainees in countries of resettlement or repatriation, and human rights and humanitarian organizations.” Ni Aoláin commended the Biden administration for allowing such unprecedented access. “Few states.,” as she puts it, “exhibit such courage.” 

In the process, she drew a uniquely sweeping picture of Guantánamo — from the period after the horrifying 9/11 attacks through the widespread and gruesome torture of prisoners at CIA black sites to the grim details of detention at Gitmo itself to the often unjust and harmful fates of the detainees who were finally released to the persistent challenges that lie ahead. It’s the first report to tie together, historically as well as legally, the many grim pieces of the post-9/11 story that have previously been underappreciated.  

Like its predecessors, Ni Aoláin’s report reiterates the sins of Guantánamo: the physical and psychological abuse and outright cruelties committed there and the lack of any access to justice for its prisoners. She also reminds us that “the vast majority of the men rendered and detained there were brought without cause and had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11.” She calls out the United States for its widespread ongoing violations of human rights and international law and mentions numerous times that the way it dealt with its detainees amounted to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” 

Her report, however, also potentially shifts the never-ending discussion of Guantánamo to new ground.

Putting the Focus on the Prisoners 

As a start, Ni Aoláin looks beyond policymaking to the more subtle forms of injustice and harm that became the daily essence of Guantánamo. She particularly focuses on what she calls the “arbitrariness” and the damage it has caused. “Arbitrariness,” she concludes, “pervades the entirety of the Guantánamo detention infrastructure,” leading to a persistent lack of predictability in treatment. While Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) do exist when it comes to “detainee reception and transfer, restraints, cell block searches, mess operations, religious accommodations, and medication distribution,” the deeper reality has been one of constant, cruel, and unpredictable deviations from those SOPs.

In fact, “arbitrariness, confusion, and inconsistency” define life at Guantánamo and have only been exacerbated by the secrecy with which those SOPs are guarded, further intensifying the cruel and inhuman treatment that has always defined that prison. Ni Aoláin suggests that it’s finally time for transparency to come to Gitmo. For example, many of the detainees suffer from the long-term effects of torture, a past all too lacking in transparency, and neither they nor their lawyers have access to their unclassified medical files.

She underscores her focus on finally bringing humanity to Gitmo by arguing that the widespread abuses Americans committed over the years, including by setting up a prison offshore of American justice, also significantly impacted the families of those who were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. She begins with torture, suggesting “that the systematic rendition and torture at multiple (including black) sites and thereafter at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — with the entrenched legal and policy practices of occluding and protecting those who ordered, perpetrated, facilitated, supervised, or concealed torture — comprise the single most significant barrier to fulfilling victims’ rights to justice and accountability.” In her view, the use of torture was “a betrayal of the rights of victims,” too, by making the holding of trials impossible to this day and so making both accountability and closure inconceivable for the victims’ families.  

While widening the lens to include a larger pool of victims, Ni Aoláin also widens the time frame.  The mistreatment of detainees at Gitmo, she emphasizes, continues to this day. “Regrettably,” she writes, “the vast majority of detainees continue to experience sustained human rights violations beginning with the very process of transfer to the country of return or resettlement.”

In fact, the transfer of former prisoners from that prison to countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Serbia, Kazakstan, and Slovakia has often resulted in yet more degradation, including utter social ostracism, the inability to obtain work, or even additional transfers to countries where yet more cruel and inhuman treatment has subsequently occurred. Sadly, for those “released” from that prison, the term “Guantanamo 2.0” best describes their situations. 

One case in particular has been a focal point for the APPG in London: Ravil Mingazov, a Russian citizen granted asylum in Great Britain. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Accused of being associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he would then be transported to Gitmo where he remained until 2017 when he was cleared for release to the UAE. After his arrival there, however, he was again imprisoned, despite assurances that his release would include rehabilitation and support for rebuilding his life. He’s now been detained there for six years. In 2021, reports circulated that the UAE was trying to send Mingazov back to Russia, where he would face probable imprisonment and mistreatment. To make matters worse, for the past two years, his family has had no news of him. 

Ni Aoláin also highlights American attempts to destroy certain parts of Guantánamo and so functionally erase the record of what went on there. She calls instead for “the preservation and access to both prior and present detention sites,” as well as medical records and digital evidence. The crimes committed at Guantánamo, she emphasizes, need to be kept on the record and addressed, adding that “the U.S. government has an ongoing obligation to investigate the crimes committed [there], including an assessment of whether they meet the threshold of war crimes and crimes against humanity.” 

Worse yet, redress for the victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families remains lacking. They continue to need treatment in ways not provided for and she recommends a “comprehensive audit of existing medical support (physical and psychological) for victims and survivors” and a commitment “to comprehensive lifelong holistic support for survivors.” 

Succinct, measured, and profoundly disturbing, her report calls for a way forward that directly addresses the crimes of the past, including the need for public apology, compensation to former detainees, and the shutting down of that infamous prison. Her message: after all these years, even decades, the harm and the crimes associated with Guantánamo are still unending.  

Where We Are Now

While the U.N., the ICRC, the British Parliament, and various nongovernmental organizations focus on Guantánamo’s sins and its painful legacy, the United States continues to fail to close the prison, even though the need for closure was acknowledged in 2006 by no less than its “founder,” President George W. Bush. On July 14th, when the House passed its version of the latest National Defense Authorization Act, it not only kept in place a prohibition on the use of funds to close Guantánamo but extended a congressional ban on using such funds to transfer detainees to the United States or six countries in the greater Middle East, making the end of Gitmo that much harder. 

With her steady hand and deployment of facts, Ni Aoláin was unsparing in her conclusions about the injustice and perpetual cruelty that still is Guantánamo. Yes, she appreciates any movement forward, even at this late date, including “the openness and willingness” of the Biden administration to allow her to visit the prison. Still, she couldn’t be clearer on what, 21 years later, is needed: accountability for the perpetrators and restitution for the victims.

Closing the prison, if it ever actually happens, will not be enough. Sadly, even such an act will not bring true closure to the sins of America’s forever prison.

Copyright 2023 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

( RFE/ RL ) – China has played a visible role in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in 2021.

Beijing is among only a handful of countries to maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul, where the Chinese ambassador regularly meets with Taliban officials.

There has also been a surge in Chinese traders visiting Afghanistan to explore business opportunities and ink deals.

The Taliban, meanwhile, has boasted of Beijing’s interest in expanding trade and investing billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s mining sector.

Last month, the hard-line Islamist group also announced the resumption of direct flights between Afghanistan and China after a three-year gap, saying it would help strengthen bilateral relations.

Despite the appearance that China and the Taliban are becoming allies, experts say the relationship is limited and largely transactional.

Experts say Beijing’s primary concern in Afghanistan is the threat posed by members of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) — an Uyghur extremist group that Beijing blames for unrest in its western province of Xinjiang and refers to by its former name, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).

The Taliban has been accused of sheltering Uyghur militants and done little to alleviate China’s security concerns.

Policymakers in Beijing also continue to worry about instability spreading from Afghanistan into South and Central Asia, where China has significant economic and political interests.

Meanwhile, Beijing has provided only limited development assistance to Afghanistan and large mining projects backed by Chinese companies have failed to get off the ground.

“China is not a ‘friend’ of the Taliban and can be relied on only to pursue its national interest,” said Barnett Rubin, an academic and former adviser to the U.S. State Department on Afghanistan. “China’s economic engagement with Afghanistan is as much if not more about national defense than profit-seeking.”

‘Terrorist Forces’

During its rule in the 1990s, the Taliban allowed Uyghur groups to operate in Afghanistan and is believed to still have links with them.

Since the Taliban regained power, the Taliban has relocated Uyghur fighters from the northeastern province of Badakhshan, which is located along Afghanistan’s 76-kilometer border with China, in a bid to allay Beijing’s fears.

But China has demanded that the Taliban cut any ties with the militants and hand them over to Beijing. The exact number of Uyghur fighters based in Afghanistan is unknown, although experts believe they number in the hundreds.

“China’s top priority in Afghanistan by far is to persuade the Taliban to turn these militants over to China,” Rubin said.

If the Taliban refuses, then Beijing expects the group to keep the activities of the Uyghur militants “under strict surveillance and control,” Rubin added.

In April, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Beijing “hopes that Afghanistan will fulfill its commitment in earnest and take more effective measures to crack down on all terrorist forces.”

Rubin says Beijing’s fears that Uyghur militants have been integrated into the Taliban’s “military and terrorist structures” explain why China is eager to increase its diplomatic and economic engagement with the Taliban.

“Chinese interests in the Afghan economy are likely about trying to incentivize the Taliban to cooperate on counterterrorism,” he said.

Economic Incentives

For the cash-strapped Taliban government, which remains internationally unrecognized, securing investment and economic assistance is seen as a top priority as it seeks domestic and international legitimacy.

The Taliban takeover triggered an economic collapse and aggravated a major humanitarian crisis, with international donors cutting crucial financial assistance to Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan’s economic catastrophe overshadows all other problems in the country,” said Hameed Hakimi, an Afghanistan expert at the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank. “If the Taliban can demonstrate that they can deliver on the economy, their popularity and support will expand considerably.”

Beijing has faced criticism for its infrastructure projects in developing countries around the world, which Western officials have described as exploitative. But that has not put off the Taliban, which has actively sought Chinese investment in Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral resources.

In April, the Taliban claimed that a Chinese firm was interested in investing $10 billion in lithium extraction, a project that it said would employ more than 120,000 Afghans.

“Afghans are looking forward to exploiting their lithium and other mining deposits for their benefit,” Shahabuddin Delawar, the Taliban’s minister for mining, said that month.

In January, the Taliban signed an oil-extraction contract with a Chinese firm. Under the deal, China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co is expected to invest up to $150 million during the first year. After three years, the amount is expected to increase to $540 million. The Taliban claims the project will provide around 3,000 local jobs.

But experts do not expect Beijing to invest heavily in Afghanistan, which lacks infrastructure and roads. Despite a dramatic increase in violence, the country is also still the scene of sporadic attacks by the Islamic State-Khorasan extremist group.

“The Taliban benefit from maintaining a relationship with the Chinese government and would also like to use it both as an insurance and leverage against Western nations,” Hakimi said.

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c)2022 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Tasnim wrote, “Conscript “Mehdi Ahmadi” was martyred while guarding the borders of Islamic Iran’s glory and honor in an armed conflict with forces under the command of the Taliban on the Iran-Afghanistan border.” The slain border guard “was unmarried and a resident of North Khorasan province.” Two other border guards were injured, it reported.

Tasnim added, “In this conflict, which was accompanied by heavy fire by the border guards, severe casualties were also caused to people under the command of the Taliban.”

The Nida-yi Baluch site posted to Twitter video purported to show Iranians firing mortars and rockets into the Makakai region of Nimruz Province, some of which landed near the provincial capital, Zaranj.

“The videos received from the other side of the border show that the Iranian border guards continue to fire in Afghanistan using heavy weapons. The residents of Zaranj claim that the weapons fired by Iran into Afghanistan cause casualties:”

ویدیو های رسیده از آن سوی مرز به ندای بلوچ نشان می دهد که مرزبانان ایرانی با استفاده از سلاح‌های سنگین به شلیک در خاک افغانستان ادامه می دهند.

باشنده‌گان زرنج ادعا می کنند که سلاح‌های که از سوی ایران به خاک افغانستان شلیک شده، تلفات در پی دارد. pic.twitter.com/dDFZyCKIBx

— ندای بلوچ_Nedaeybaloch (@nedaeybaloch) May 27, 2023

The issue over which tensions are running high is how to divide the waters of the Helmand River, which the two nations must share.

China’s Xinhua News Agency reported that Iranian member of parliament Hossein-Ali Shahriari, who represents Zahidan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan Province, charged the Taliban government in Afghanistan with stopping up the flow of the Helman River so that its waters were not reaching Iran. He said Iranian satellite photos demonstrated that the Afghans were storing extra water in the Kamal Khan Dam and other reservoirs. He complained that the Afghans have recently built new dams that are storing water that would otherwise have flowed to Iran.

A few years ago, Fatemeh Aman wrote a good summary of this conflict for the Atlantic Council, noting that drought and climate change have exacerbated the conflict.

Both countries have built dams on the Helmand and irrigated off it, often to raise water-hungry crops not suitable to this arid environment.

She notes, “The Helmand is the longest river in Afghanistan, constituting over 40 percent of Afghanistan’s surface water. With 95 percent of the Helmand located in Afghanistan, it is a critical source of livelihood for the country’s southern and southwestern provinces.”

The river flows into Iran’s arid southwest, where the inhabitants also need and value it.

The Helmand used to feed the Hamoun wetlands on the Iran side and lakes on the Afghan side, but damming, irrigation, and drought have partially dried these up, creating conditions for toxic dust clouds.

In short, the conflict here is a little like the one between Egypt and Ethiopia over damming the Nile.

Iran and Afghanistan are projected to heat up faster than the world average, twice as fast, in fact. Already, poor water management and extra heat have had a devastating effect on the Helmand basin. Extra heat dries out the soil and contributes to more intense and more frequent droughts. It also causes greater and more rapid evaporation of water from lakes and rivers. Many social scientists foresee water wars as a result. This border clash is a small omen of bigger conflicts to come.